Jeremy Renner pushes down on his eight-week-old French bulldog's tiny rear. "Sit, Franklin — sit!" he hisses. "Will you sit, you d***head?" After the shock of seeing one of Hollywood's hardest movie stars swagger into the room with a dog in tow, the outburst of aggression comes as something of a relief.
Handbag-sized pooch aside, 40-year-old Renner — the rough-hewn star of Dahmer, The Hurt Locker and The Town — is about as far removed from the Paris Hilton brigade as possible. With his indigo jeans tucked into a pair of army surplus boots, a battered leather jacket hugging his workout-thickened frame and a squint that's fast becoming box office gold, the actor looks more like he's heading into mortal combat than an interview.
Then again, considering the line Renner likes to draw between his private and professional life, perhaps the two aren't so different.
Does he dislike doing press that much, I ask. "Oh no," he assures me with a polite smile. "I'm getting better at it all the time." It's just as well. As one envious male actor friend puts it the night before we meet: "That boy is cleaning up: 2012 is Renner's year."
To have landed a starring role as the former spy Brandt alongside Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol would have been enough to propel Renner to new heights. Throw in his part as Hawkeye in The Avengers, an all-star superhero epic that has him battling alongside Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk, his lead in the Grimm fairy tales update Hansel and Gretel, not to mention the role created for him within the Bourne franchise, where he is to take over from Matt Damon, and you've got yourself the new Tom Cruise.
Not that you could say that to Renner; the merest hint of a comparison prompts protestations of humility. "Tom's been so giving with me throughout the process," he says. "He's much more of a collaborator than an adviser."
Renner talks me through the meeting with uber-producer J.J. Abrams that changed everything. "We were discussing another film when suddenly he asked whether I might have time to meet with Tom Cruise about Mission Impossible that afternoon. Three hours later, I'm sitting down with them both — and something about it just feels right. So I get home and Tom calls straight away. Within the hour, I'd signed up to the next three MI films."
Luckily for Renner, what would turn out to be one of the most physically challenging roles of his career was followed by The Avengers, and the fourth Bourne film, The Bourne Legacy.
Training
"Half the guys I trained with on The Avengers were also on Bourne, so I didn't have to work as hard to get in shape. Still, I owe my biggest debt to Tom because he taught me how to manage my body and avoid injury. He's eight years older, so he's had a lot more experience in knowing how to protect himself."
Of all three films, the training for Mission Impossible was by far the most gruelling. Besides leaping from a skyscraper in Dubai, Renner says it involved a lot of Muay Thai, a martial arts technique that involves boxing and kicking. Then he was taught "fast hands boxing", "Filipino stick fighting", and knife throwing. "Some of those techniques have a real balletic beauty — even if they are basically about taking someone out as quickly and efficiently as you can," he chuckles.
Renner would get home covered in bruises with a sprained neck, but when The Avengers came around, again he insisted on doing his own stunts.
"I was never really into the comics when I was a kid, so it wasn't like I was this diehard Avengers fan beforehand. But I found out that Hawkeye's an archer," he grins. "Usually archery is pretty focused and sniper-like, but this was about using the bow as a staff and a sword amid warlike chaos."
Still, what he had to contend with, he jokes, was nothing compared to the daily ordeal of his co-star Scarlett Johansson — aka Black Widow — forced to winch herself into a skin-tight black leather catsuit for the duration of filming.
"Every morning she had to get into that thing," he laughs. "So she was on a strict diet and working her butt off learning all these fight moves that would normally be in her ‘house of pain'."
Renner was famously less than happy about the hell he endured while filming his Oscar-nominated role in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker; he became ill, shed weight at an alarming rate, and kept passing out from the Jordanian heat. "Will I go out and shoot in the desert again for Hurt Locker II?" he said at the time. "You couldn't pay me enough money."
Today, he describes himself as an "easygoing dude" at odds with his tough-guy roles. "I was an athlete when I was growing up," he shrugs, "so maybe I'm just someone who likes to participate. If I go to the beach, I can't just lie there and roast like a suckling pig. I've got to be active in life, and it's the same when I'm doing stunts in a movie: I'll do anything."
Renner may have come to acting late in life but his interest in the twisted and the macabre, his fascination with the anti-hero, made itself felt when he was still a child and dreamt of being a detective.
"I liked the good guy, bad guy dynamic — it goes back to the root of storytelling, to Greek mythology."
From the start, Renner admits, the roles that he "connected to — the ones that made me feel like I was flourishing — were really f***** up". He played the scarecrow in a local rendition of Wizard of Oz, then a suicidal teen in a theatre production called Ordinary People, but it was his first real "bad boy" role in a 1998 play called Search and Destroy that triggered something within him.
"The character I was playing was so far from what I was. But I feel like everyone has the capacity to do terrible things. Even if you disregard the sick and the mentally ill, I think we all have this curiosity about what it would be like to rob a bank or do something really bad. I'm pretty well-balanced as a human being, but you don't always want to be nice and sometimes it's lovely to be able to purge all these negative thoughts by acting out all this stuff."
What were these negative thoughts to do with? His parents' divorce?
"Of course," he says. "It had to do with all of that. Look, I wasn't beaten and there was no alcoholism at home, but it hits you in different ways. I'm sure that that's where my temperament came from and my inability to deal with certain emotions."
Low points
Within the industry, Renner is often likened to Sean Penn for his intense, nomadic qualities, the trappings of celebrity not seeming to hold much allure. Indeed, it's the low points of his career and not the obvious triumphs that Renner describes in the most nostalgic terms.
"The last 11 years have been great," he tells me at one point, "but prior to Dahmer I had to do whatever it took to get by. I couldn't afford any power so I lived by candlelight in an apartment where the water didn't work. There was a place nearby called Yum Yum Donuts where you could get 14 doughnuts for 99 cents, so I would spread those out over the week and sometimes mix it up by getting two cheeseburgers for a dollar and making them last. I was getting by eating on $10 a month back then."
When it came, fame wasn't something he "relished". He gets a fair amount of paparazzi attention in LA but hasn't yet holed himself up in a high-security compound in the hills and gets "lots of notes stuck under my door".
"Still, they're nice notes, so I can't complain." He tells me about a famous actress friend who is being stalked at the moment. "It's scary stuff, but if a girl ever does that to me, what's really going to happen? I have a shotgun and a samurai sword under my bed, so I'm protected." I burst out laughing, but Renner is serious. "I'm not lying," he assures me — and it's his turn to laugh.
He's proof that in personal relationship terms, you can just opt out of the fame game — even at his level. His 40th birthday party was awash with A-listers like Leonardo DiCaprio, Christina Aguilera and Johansson, but unlike his guests, he's so far managed to keep his private life exactly that.
He's not about to break any confidences with me, laughing off rumours that Johansson made a play for him on The Avengers set ("Oh no — we're just really good friends") and suggestions that he once dated Charlize Theron ("I never looked at her as seductive — I always think of her more as a drinking buddy").
"Look," he surmises, impassioned and slightly breathless as we get onto an actor's public role, "I think it's the individual's prerogative if they want to use their celebrity to create awareness about something, but I have never and will never use it to put across my personal belief systems. That's where you expose your personal life, and that's no one's business unless you're a friend of mine and we're privy to each other's beliefs. Either I'm accepted or I'm not, either I'm loved or I'm hated and none of them even know[s] who I am. I feel blessed to be in this spot and I'm conscious of letting the work speak for who I am."
Which, to his credit, it always has. For now, there's a long awaited Steve McQueen biopic in the pipeline, for which Renner would be perfect "if the script ever comes in", and the possibility of him playing Kurt Cobain in the distant future.
And if it all dries up, he laughs, there are always the doughnuts to fall back on. "When I think back to some of the situations I've found myself in throughout my life, I don't think you can ever complain. If there's an issue or a problem — find a solution and get through it."
He's good at that, he says. "I'll give you an example: I can make something out of whatever's in the fridge. Doesn't matter if it's only Parmesan and butter: I'll make you a sauce out of that. I know how to get creative; I had to get creative, because I had nothing."
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2011
