Jeremy Renner takes aim at TV in 'Hawkeye' and 'Mayor of Kingstown'

When Jeremy Renner has the time — a commodity that is in short supply for him lately — he sometimes thinks about why film and TV creators like to cast him as hardened, emotionally wrung-out men in need of redemption.

Setting aside his Academy Award-nominated performances in tense dramas like “The Hurt Locker” and “The Town,” Renner suspected that his tendency to be hired for what he called “coiled-spring characters” probably has something to do with his distinctively rugged countenance.

“I don’t have a Disney face,” he said, letting loose with a raspy laugh. Contemplating himself from a distance, he continued: “That guy, he’s got some experience in his life. He’s got some hardships. There are murderous qualities in that resting face of his.”

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That being said, “Can I also do a Disney film?” he added. “Hell yeah, I can do a Disney film. I’m not the king of darkness here.”

Audiences can see that duality on display this month when Renner — who has not played a continuing TV role in more than a decade — stars in two very different streaming series, debuting 10 days apart.

Last Sunday, Renner was introduced as Mike McLusky, the disconsolate protagonist of “Mayor of Kingstown,” a new Paramount+ series from the “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan, about the interconnected lives in a fictional Michigan city centered on a prison.

On Wednesday, he will return to the role of Clint Barton, the wisecracking marksman of the Avengers, in “Hawkeye,” a six-episode miniseries on Disney+.

“Hawkeye” promises the signature buoyancy of the Marvel franchise, with its alternating beats of one-liners and explosions, as well as some narrative consequence. Renner was particularly amused by its contrasts with “Mayor of Kingstown.”

“This is sweet, light fare,” he said. “There’s some heaviness to it, don’t get me wrong. But comparatively, ‘Mayor of Kingstown’ is going to hit people with a hammer.”

That he can star in both shows — that creators and audiences accept him in projects that are popular and that are personal, playing men of decisive deeds and men with internalized conflicts — is a source of both puzzlement and delight to him.

He has been moving on these parallel tracks for many years, well before he fired his first arrow in a Marvel movie. Now a combination of eclectic choices and unexpected circumstances have led the 50-year-old Renner to this pair of prominent streaming projects — an outcome that he finds satisfying, even if he’s not sure what it says about him or the vagaries of sustaining a lengthy Hollywood career.

“Some people just know me as Hawkeye,” Renner said. “Some people go a little deeper — ‘He was also Jeffrey Dahmer, he was nominated for this, he’s actually a proper actor.’”

He added: “Either way, I don’t care. That’s awesome, either way you see me.”

In late October, Renner was speaking in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles as he sipped from a mug bearing the letters TCB, as in the Elvis Presley motto Taking Care of Business. He had wrapped shooting on “Mayor of Kingstown” a few weeks earlier — an assignment he’d gone on to immediately after finishing “Hawkeye” — and was still feeling the impact of those consecutive projects.

“It took a toll on me,” he said. “I had no life, ultimately. I was always on set or in character or in costume on one of the shows.”

Constant activity is something of a default state for Renner, who outside of his acting has kept busy with real-estate investments, a collection of cars and motorcycles and recording his own music.

He did, however, have to pull the plug on another side project, the Jeremy Renner Official mobile app, an online platform that shared news, photos and other content about him but became a target for internet trolls. “It just became more complicated than it needed to be for my life,” Renner explained. “I’m still proud of the idea to give more time to superfans, the will behind it. But I just don’t have the time or capacity to do it.”

He was just as frenetic in his earliest days as a theater actor, as he pivoted from playing the Scarecrow in a Modesto Junior College production of “The Wizard of Oz” to parts in Lyle Kessler’s brutal thriller “Orphans” and as a suicidal teenager in a stage version of “Ordinary People.”

Even as Renner began to break through in film and television, he was reluctant to contemplate what his dream roles were — if he had any at all. “Maybe 10, 15 years ago, I was like, it’d be cool to be a cowboy in a Western,” he said. “It’d be cool to be in sci-fi. But that’s just an ego thing — those are only words.”

And then in short order he fulfilled all those goals, delivering memorable performances in movies like “28 Weeks Later” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

When Marvel started considering him for Hawkeye, Renner was riding high from “The Town,” a Boston crime thriller, and “The Hurt Locker,” an anxious Iraq War drama, and the studio believed he could bring a strain of realism to contrast with fantastical characters like Iron Man, Captain America and Thor.

Kevin Feige, the Marvel Studios president, said that Renner was sought to supply “the human element of ‘The Avengers’ — the Everyman who gets banged and bruised up, who can’t fly and still runs into battle with the best of them.”

He added, “It needed an actor who could stay grounded despite the insanity surrounding him, and also have a wry sense of humor while doing that.”

Renner took on the role and the multiyear commitment it meant, grateful that it offered him the freedom to be more selective about his non-Marvel work. “I got to make very specific choices and easier choices,” he said. “I don’t have to do a big picture. I can just do what makes sense for me.”

He acknowledged some frustration with the first “Avengers” film, which Hawkeye largely spent as an unwilling villain under the spell of the nefarious Loki. Renner said he felt like little more than “one of the cogs in the wheel.” But the sequels, which explored Clint Barton’s love for his family — and his desire for revenge when they are erased from existence — satisfied Renner’s desire for a more well-rounded character.

In our own conversation, Renner remarked more than once that going straight from “Hawkeye” (which filmed in New York and Atlanta) to “Mayor of Kingstown” (which was shot in Toronto and in Kingston, Ontario) had been grueling, and that he might not have taken on the workload if he hadn’t been able to bring his 8-year-old daughter, Ava, to these locations. (Renner shares custody of Ava with his ex-wife, model and actress Sonni Pacheco, with whom he has exchanged some contentious legal filings over the years.)

In 2017, Renner starred in “Wind River,” a thriller in the mode of a modern-day Western. The film was written and directed by Sheridan, the actor-turned-screenwriter (“Sicario,” “Hell or High Water”), and during its production he and Renner bonded over shared sensibilities. When Paramount enlisted Sheridan to produce more content for the studio’s streaming service, he pursued Renner to star in “Mayor of Kingstown.” (Sheridan created that series with Hugh Dillon, one of its co-stars.)

“At the end of the day, I make highfalutin action films,” Sheridan said. “I make ‘Road House’ with a message. I need someone that has the physicality and the intensity, but also the vulnerability.”

Sheridan added, “My characters begin broken and then heal, and there’s an innate sadness that he can give them.”

In “Mayor of Kingstown,” Renner’s character, McLusky, works with his brother Mitch (Kyle Chandler) as a go-between for prison workers, inmates and their families, which gives him unique inroads to the city’s intertwined power systems. “In order to truly advocate for them, you’ve got to have relationships with the people who control them,” Sheridan explained. “You’ve got to have relationships with the mobsters, with the judges, with the police.”

Before filming “Mayor of Kingstown,” Renner had signed on for “Hawkeye,” a six-episode mini-series that grew out of an earlier agreement to make a stand-alone Marvel film about that character.

“Hawkeye,” which takes some inspiration from an inventive run on the comic-book series by the writer Matt Fraction and artists including David Aja, is set primarily after the events of the 2019 blockbuster “Avengers: Endgame.” The show focuses on the unlikely partnership that develops between Barton and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), a young woman at the center of a high-society mystery whom he reluctantly takes on as his protegee.

Steinfeld said that Renner was understanding about her lack of experience in the big-budget Marvel universe. In one of their first conversations on the project, Steinfeld said, she asked him a naive question about archery.

“I was like, ‘You’re going to have to teach me a thing or two,’ ” she recalled. “He just started laughing and was like, ‘Listen, you’re never actually going to shoot the arrow — it will be CG.’ ”
Between the two new series, Renner expected that “Hawkeye” would likely be “the flashier one,” but he also said that he hoped viewers would not be dissuaded from “Mayor of Kingstown” by its starker exterior.

“I’m always hesitant to say, ‘This is dark, it’s harrowing, it’s bleak,’ ” he said. “It sounds depressing and no one wants to watch it. We’re not asking people to follow the bleakness — you follow the hope of the people who are trying to escape from this environment or make it better. It’s actually very beautiful to watch.”

He was confident that there would be more seasons of “Mayor of Kingstown” in his future and that, whatever the outcome of “Hawkeye,” he would surely be playing Clint Barton again.

“I can make that live for another decade,” Renner said. “Until I just can’t fit into the damn costume anymore.” As for acting as a whole, he said, “I’ll do it till no one wants to see me do it.”