Jeremy Renner on movie Kill the Messenger, Mission: Impossible co-star Tom Cruise and hints at more Hawkeye in The Avengers: Age of Ultron
AVENGER. Action hero. New dad. Film producer. Oscar nominee. Husband. Renovator ... The Hurt Locker guy’s busier than Tom Cruise.
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THREE years ago, Jeremy Renner marvelled to News Corp Australia that his Mission: Impossible co-star Tom Cruise seemed to have 48 hours in a day.
“Literally,” said Renner, “he’ll be up two hours before work, training, then put on the producer hat and make sure everyone’s happy, then go home and be a dad for a minute, then he watches movies! How in the world?”
Nowadays, 43-year-old Renner is giving Cruise a run for his money in the time-stretching stakes: keeping himself in peak condition for Mission: Impossible 5and The Avengers: Age of Ultron, producing low-budget passion project Kill the Messenger, being dad to 19-month-old Ava and — take this, Tom! — continuing his sideline career in renovating houses.
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“I don’t think anybody can catch up to Tom,” Renner demurs. “I’m working with Tom right now and still marvel at all he gets done in a day, it’s amazing. But I am very busy.
“At some point I wanna uplug for a minute,” he laughs, “but just not right now.”
As an actor who didn’t find his place in movies until his late 30s — garnering back-to-back Oscar nominations for The Hurt Locker and The Town — Renner has worked too hard to slow down when he’s finally secured a solid platform.
With three major franchises — M:I, Bourne, Avengers — to anchor him, Renner is at the point now where he can push through smaller films that really speak to him.
Hence Kill the Messenger, the eye-opening true story of Californian journalist Gary Webb, who in 1996 broke the story that the CIA was allowing crack cocaine to flood the US in order to arm rebels in Nicaragua.
Dismayed at missing the story and taking the CIA’s word as gospel, larger news outlets set about discrediting Webb and dismantling his life.
Years later, the CIA released documents vindicating Webb’s work, but the media and public, distracted by the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, barely noticed. Webb took his own life in 2004.
“I know that me coming on to produce and star in this thing is what got it made. That’s a wonderful thing,” says Renner. “I’ll use that wisely and to my advantage and hopefully to the advantage of filmgoers. Movies like this still need to be made and I think people still want to see them.”
Renner’s producer title is no mere vanity credit; he put in the hard yards, especially when it came to securing Kill the Messenger’s cast.
“Whatever I had to do, I would have done it,” he laughs when asked if he had to wash the cars of Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Michael Sheen, Robert Patrick, Oliver Platt, Paz Vega, Michael K. Williams et al.
“I was begging and pleading. But it ended up being a little easier than I thought.”
Describing the cast as “a revolving door of tremendous, tremendous talent” who would “come in for a day and just crush it,” Renner is particularly fond of a scene he shared with legendary tough guy Liotta.
“That’s awesome, right? Ray is such a funny guy. He’s just born with that resting face like he wants to kill you, which I appreciate. But he happens to be the sweetest guy; funny as all hell.”
Renner’s own acting work, which some are calling the best performance of his career, was aided by similarities he felt he shared with Webb.
“His doggedness, his tenacity, his perseverance ... all those things I could connect to in some way. At any given moment this film could have been touting Gary Webb to be this great hero, but just because you do great things doesn’t mean you’re a great guy. He’s just a really interesting, flawed human.”
When Webb’s work was called into question, so too was his personal life. Renner knows a thing or two about being followed by paparazzi or being asked about bar fights rather than his work.
“There’s a parallel with my life being a celebrity that coincides with that for sure. Playing that aspect of it, the frustrations and all that came along with it, was pretty easy.”
Renner does have plans to unplug — for one week at Christmas.
“As it goes: I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he says. “I’m very blessed to have the things that I have and I love to be busy ... The only thing that keeps sticking in my craw at this point is not seeing my baby. That really gets to me.”
Ava, Renner’s daughter with Canadian model wife Sonni Pacheco, may be little but she’s looming large in dad’s career calculations.
“I’m very cognisant of where things shoot at this point. There are very, very few movies I would do overseas,” he says. “If it doesn’t benefit my daughter, then I ain’t doin’ it. Very simple.”
So, despite having a “really great” time shooting M: I5 in London with Cruise and Co, Renner will be relieved when it wraps in January.
And when it comes to the third Avengers instalment, he reckons so many of the high-powered cast members have families now that it will have to shoot somewhere in North America.
Of course, before that happens, there’s still the small matter of releasing The Avengers: Age of Ultron on April 23.
Renner — who plays the gang’s archer, Hawkeye — was blunt about feeling like a pawn lost in the scale of the first flick. He says Age of Ultron goes some way to rectifying that.
“I get to dig into the character a lot more. It’s really what (writer-director) Joss Wheden and Downey and I talked about initially for Hawkeye ... But you know, writing The Avengers movie is damn near impossible. Joss somehow did it and made it great ... and did it again on this one.
“This time, I had a really, really good time.”
KILL THE MESSENGER OPENS TODAY
Originally published as Jeremy Renner on movie Kill the Messenger, Mission: Impossible co-star Tom Cruise and hints at more Hawkeye in The Avengers: Age of Ultron
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