Jeremy Renner #4: Jeremy Always Brings Us His Muscles!!
Jeremy Renner #4: Jeremy Always Brings Us His Muscles!!
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Jeremy’s official biography:
Academy award nominee Jeremy Renner starred in the 2010 Best Picture winner “The Hurt Locker.” Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the film received six academy awards and was inspired by true events about a team in present-day Baghdad that regularly deals with bomb disposal under the constant danger of sniper fire. In his role as the self-assured Sgt. James, Renner was awarded the Breakthrough Actor Award at the Hollywood Film Festival, the Spotlight Award at the Savannah Film Festival and was nominated as Best Actor at the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards, as well as garnering a nomination for Breakthrough Actor at the Gotham Awards in addition to his nomination for Best Ensemble Performance and, of course a nomination as Best Actor by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Renner next stars in “The Town” a film directed by Ben Affleck for Warner Bros. The film is an adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel “Prince of Thieves” and centers on a thief (Affleck) and his best friend and member of his gang (Renner) and is scheduled for release in the fall of 2010.
In 2007, Renner was seen in three different features, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” for Warner Bros. directed by Andrew Dominik. Renner starred alongside Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck playing a key member of James’ gang, Wood Hide; “28 Weeks Later,” the highly anticipated sequel to “28 Days Later,” and, “Take” opposite Minnie Driver.
In 2006, he also starred in the acclaimed independent film “12 and Holding” (Independent Spirit Award Nominee – John Cassavetes Award) demonstrating his dramatic range playing ‘Gus,’ a firefighter who moves to a new town after the haunting loss of a young girl in a fire and who finds a way to heal himself by helping a young girl in his new town cope with her own loss and grief.
Other recent film credits include the independent film “Neo Ned” in which he stared opposite Gabrielle Union. “Neo Ned” was screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and swept the feature film category at the 11th Annual Palm Beach International Film Festival in 2006. “Neo Ned” was awarded Best Feature Film, Best Director and Best Actor went to Jeremy. The film was also awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking Best Feature Film Award at the Newport Beach Film Festival in April 2006. These awards come after winning the Audience Award at the Slamdance, Sarasota and Ashland film festivals.
In Warner Bros.’ “North Country” Renner starred opposite Academy Award® winner Charlize Theron. A fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the U.S., Renner is at the center of the unfolding drama as ‘Bobby Sharp.’ Working with ‘Josie Aimes’ (Theron) at the mine in their hometown, ‘Bobby’ often clashes with the single mother over his view that women shouldn’t work in such a demanding environment. Their disagreements drive the drama, leading ‘Josie’ to file a class action lawsuit against the company.
Renner has been on a fast-paced production schedule the past few years. He has been seen in “A Little Trip to Heaven,” where he again refined his skill for dark troubled characters. Starring opposite Julia Stiles, Renner’s diabolical con man ‘Kelvin’ breaks out of prison to find his partner-in-crime/lover ‘Isold’ (Stiles), murdering her current lover, faking his own death and convincing her to join him in a new scheme. “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things,” directed by Asia Argento as adapted from the critically acclaimed novel by J.T. Leroy. Columbia Pictures’ “Lords of Dogtown” for helmer Catherine Hardwicke and Aura Entertainment’s independent film “Love Comes to the Executioner,” written and directed by Kyle Bergersen.
He was seen in the summer 2003 hit “S.W.A.T.” opposite Colin Farrell and Samuel L. Jackson.
The one role that put Renner on the map and that earned the actor an Independent Spirit Award nomination, was his role as ‘Jeffrey Dahmer’ in the indie hit “Dahmer.”
With a background in theater, Renner starred in but also co-directed, “Search and Destroy,” which was produced by Barry Levinson and received stellar reviews. Daily Variety said, “Renner is excellent as a low-keyed sociopath,” while L.A. Weekly boasted “…dapper, would be wise guy, Renner is terrific in finding eccentric comedy…expertly executed.”
Between film and theater, he finds the time to write, record, and perform his own music brand of contemporary rock. Renner has written songs for Warner Chapel Publishing and Universal Publishing.
For Jeremy’s up-to-date filmography please visit Jeremy’s IMDB page.
Filmography:
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (post-production)--- Hansel
The Bourne Legacy (post-production)--- Aaron Cross--- 2012
Untitled James Gray Project (post-production)--- Orlando the Magician--- 2012
The Avengers--- Clint Barton / Hawkeye--- 2012
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol--- William Brandt--- 2011
In 1992, Jeremy Renner came to Los Angeles as an aspiring actor with three specific goals in mind. (1) He wanted to be in a movie. (2) He wanted to have a significant enough role that he wouldn’t have to explain that he was, say, that guy wearing the red shirt in the party scene. (3) He wanted to appear in a film big enough that it would play in his hometown of Modesto.
Renner figured it would probably take him a decade or so to meet those goals. As it happened, he achieved them on his first job — as an underachieving teen in the 1995 high-school comedy National Lampoon’s Senior Trip.
But if he thought success would unfold in a predictable fashion from there, life had other plans. Four years later, Renner was living by candlelight in his apartment because he couldn’t afford to pay his electric bill. And 10 long years and two dozen mostly minor film and TV appearances after that — well past the point when many reasonable people would have abandoned the acting dream — his career suddenly took off with his Oscar-nominated turn as a single-minded Army explosives expert in the 2009 Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker.
Spoiler:
“It was like you’re playing baseball your whole life and then you suddenly get on a team and go to the World Series,” Renner reflected one afternoon this summer, perched on a stool at a bar in his sprawling home in Hollywood, a house once owned by director Preston Sturges. (Renner, who has a side business buying, renovating and reselling houses, has worked to restore the property to its former glory.) “All of a sudden I was ‘the new guy in town’ after being here 20 years. I was like, ‘That’s fine by me, I’ll be the new guy."
At 43, Renner is no longer the new guy, but he continues to carve out one of the most improbable acting careers in a city full of them. A leading man with the rugged looks and slightly off-kilter sensibility of a character actor, he finds himself in the enviable situation of balancing roles in a number of the industry’s biggest franchises — the Avengers, Mission: Impossible and Bourne series — with smaller dramas like 2010’s The Town, for which he earned his second Oscar nod, 2013’s American Hustle and Kill the Messenger, which opens on October 10.
In Kill the Messenger, Renner plays newspaper reporter Gary Webb, who published a series of investigative stories in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 alleging that throughout the crack epidemic of the 1980s, drug-trafficking profits were used by the CIA to support the Nicaraguan Contras. Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series sparked a public firestorm, and a number of other news organisations including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post dispatched their own reporters to pick apart his work. Buffeted by controversy, dismissed by many as a conspiracy theorist, Webb saw his career founder. He eventually resigned from the San Jose Mercury News, and in 2004 he took his own life.
Over the years, Webb’s work has been reappraised and largely vindicated. In 2006, the L.A. Times published an op-ed by journalist Nick Schou, whose book about Webb, also titled Kill the Messenger, was the eventual basis for the new movie. Schou wrote that while there were “major flaws of hyperbole” in “Dark Alliance,” they ultimately “had more to do with poor editing than bad reporting.”
Then-L.A. Times managing editor Leo Wolinsky (who is portrayed in the film by Dan Futterman) told Schou , “In some ways, Gary got too much blame. He did exactly what you expect from a great investigative reporter.”
Despite hailing from close to where Webb’s story unfolded, Renner was unfamiliar with the history before the script came along. (The closest he ever came to the story, he said, was when he auditioned for a This Is Your Brain on Drugs public-service ad early in his career.) What interested him was less the political aspect of Webb’s saga than the personal one.
“Pointing the finger at the CIA or Ronald Reagan or whatever — that’s a very complicated net to cast,” Renner said. “What I liked about the story is you could personalise it to one human being that really got screwed over. I love all that cinema of the 1970s, and that’s what this felt like to me. It resonated with movies like All the President’s Men and The Parallax View.”
Director Michael Cuesta, who among other credits earned an Emmy nod for directing the pilot episode of “Homeland,” says that, more than comic-book movies or action blockbusters, “Kill the Messenger” _ the first film Renner has produced under his production banner, the Combine _ represents the type of film closest to the actor’s true spirit. Indeed, early reviews have praised Renner’s performance as one of the strongest of his career.
“I’m not discounting any of his [franchise] work, because he’s a movie star, and that’s what movie stars need to do to finance these kinds of films,” Cuesta said.
“But we haven’t seen him play a mature guy with a family and a passion for his calling in life, and he is perfect for that. His face communicates so much in the quiet moments, you don’t have to have any dialogue.”
Kill the Messenger co-star Rosemarie DeWitt, who plays Webb’s wife, Susan, admires the way Renner has managed to navigate between the commercial and artistic poles of Hollywood. “The fact that he can straddle those worlds so effortlessly — as an actor, it’s wildly inspiring,” she said.
It hasn’t always been easy. Renner, who is shooting the fifth instalment in the Mission: Impossible series and will reprise his role as the bow-and-arrow-wielding superhero Hawkeye next year in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, admits he felt overwhelmed when, after years of just getting by, he suddenly found himself inundated with a string of high-profile, high-pressure offers, including inheriting the Bourne franchise from Matt Damon.
“I was doing Mission: Impossible, then Hansel & Gretel, then Avengers, and then Bourne reared its head,” he said. “That was when I started freaking out. I had to think, ‘Can I do this physically? Am I going to have free-will time, or am I just going to be working for the man?’ I had a lot of fears about it. Suddenly I’m action-hero guy. I didn’t see myself that way.”
In conversation, Renner, whose parents managed a bowling alley in Modesto and divorced when he was 10, comes across as no-nonsense and unapologetically rough around the edges. (A singer-songwriter and guitarist on the side, he’s interested in possibly playing outlaw country singer Waylon Jennings in a biopic.)
“I’m very aware of all of my flaws and strengths as a human being and very content with them,” he said. “I’ll be the same with Barack Obama as I am in any scenario.”
In fact, Renner met President Obama at a private event in Beverly Hills in 2012, and his lack of a filter was on full display. “I probably said some very offensive things,” Renner said. “I said something about how he should strap on an Avengers costume: ‘You know, you could get some votes, dude. Sling a bow and arrow around you and people will start liking you.’ That’s OK, he laughed.”
While Webb’s life came unravelled in the wake of what seemed to be his biggest triumph, Renner — who recently got married for the first time to model Sonni Pacheco, with whom he has a one-year-old daughter — is trying to keep all the balls of his success in the air as gracefully as he can. And now he has a new goal.
“The plan was always that I would retire when I’m 45,” he said. “Now mind you: My definition of retirement doesn’t mean I’m not working anymore. It just means I will have acquired enough work and value in my life to where I don’t have to worry or shape a career or invest in anything.”
If Renner has learned anything about Hollywood at this point, though, it’s that sometimes you need to tweak your goals a bit — and the retirement idea is no exception. “Maybe when I’m 50,” he said with a wry grin.
I can't wait for AoU and more Clint. He deserves the greater screentime they're promising him. Also, that shot from the trailer where he's in a clock just watching the city, damn. Awesome cinematography!