In that respect, it’s hopeful, and even though it looks bleak, there is a real humanity to it.” You kind of have to shift your perspective, and say, okay, in this town, the best thing that can ever happen is just some sort of peace, and not anarchy or chaos. There’s really not a lot of hope for the mayor, sure-you’re kind of spinning your wheels if you’re that guy-but at least there is peace. “When you put a lens on something, you get a very specific microcosm of humanity, and this is a town that’s kind of a prison itself, because it’s a prison town. “It’s easy to talk about how the show is bleak and hopeless, but it’s actually not that in my mind,” he tells me when I offer that I find it to be a fairly desolate evocation of the human condition. His character’s gift to this somewhat broken community is peace, but the question is: at what personal cost comes his generosity of spirit? Suffice to say, it’s got a body count. If you should need any proof of our cover star’s success in finding humanity in pitch black situations, you don’t need to look any further than his current grit-and-grime crime show Mayor of Kingstown, in which he plays a man dedicated to keeping a delicate balance of order in a community teetering upon the edge of chaos. It’s coming through darkness or hardships or failures in life, where successes become real success.”
“A truth doesn’t exist without a lie, you know? My job is always to look at other people’s perspectives, and in general, I always try to remain very, very hopeful about even the bleakest situation. In fact, to watch Renner ply his trade is very often to wonder: is this guy a bad person trying to be good, or a good person trying to be bad? “I don’t think there is light without the dark,” says Renner, thoughtfully, when we connect across the Atlantic on Zoom.
#Zadig&voltaire how to
Let’s be clear, this is a guy who almost managed to humanize the inhuman real-life cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer in one of his earliest forays into cinema almost two decades ago, and has since quietly carved an enviable reputation as an enigmatic character actor, who also knows how to handle himself when it comes to hi-octane action. The 50-year-old actor from Modesto, California has built a formidable career playing the troubled everyman in extraordinary situations-from portraying a PTSD-scarred bomb disposal expert (in his major breakthrough role The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow), to nestling a profound darkness within the reluctant Avenger and sometimes assassin Hawkeye (whom he plays in the quantum-time-loop-skipping Marvel Universe). To put that another way, inner conflict and existential paradox is my thing, and it’s also something Renner loves to take a deep-dive into. I figure that an actor with a penchant for playing masculine guys with inner lives immersed in a vortex of moral and existential paradox might just have an interesting take on the mind-blowing gift of existence-something beyond a reductive positivity slogan, at least.
It’s the opportunity to explore this born-never-asked paradigm we all have a stake in that crackles my synapses when Flaunt hits me up to ask if I would like to interview Jeremy Renner for The Gift Issue. Nonetheless, it strikes me that life is indeed the ultimate ‘surprise’ gift-after all, no one consciously chooses to be flung into being from nothingness, and were you actually able to process one iota of the phenomenology in any single moment you’ve been ‘gifted’ since birth, your head would likely explode piñata-style. How many times have you come across the phrase the gift of life? Sure, the briefest of scans across the minute-to-minute content avalanche of the soon-to-be meta-verse presents an endless stream of sentimental tropes espousing the notion, devaluing it one trite haiku at-a-time.
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