Jeremy Renner doesn’t have one of those handy “I always wanted to be an actor” stories. His journey to the screen was, much like the man, a rather unpretentious, play-it-by-instinct series of events that began to unfold in college.
“I was fumbling around with different majors like most people do,” the actor says, calling from somewhere on the road to Los Angeles in Northern California. “I was a criminology major and I was interested in science. I took an elective, which was an acting class, and that was a pretty wonderful place for me to express 19 years of repression, and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the stage.”
Even though Renner is making his screen impact felt in films like “28 Weeks Later,” “The Assassinantion of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” opening in limited U.S. release today, he says he still holds a special place for theater. “There’s something that you can’t get anywhere else,” he says, “that living, breathing sort of synergy that kind of happens on stage and with your audience, it’s a wonderful cohesive feeling.”
Nothing he had performed could serve as any sort of preparation for his role as an Army bomb squad officer, a cog in the wheel of the military’s Explosive Ordinance Detail (EOD). Mark Boal’s thoroughly researched screenplay first crossed Renner’s path when he was in London filming Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s “28 Weeks Later.” Producer Greg Shapiro approached him with the material and the character leapt off the page at the actor.
“It wasn’t one of those things that I needed to decide to do it or not,” Renner says. “There was no choice in the matter to me. I’ve never been so affected or so interested in a project. I just thought that EOD was a whole world that had never been explored in cinema. On paper, he was one of the best-written characters I’d seen in a long time. I had so many questions and answers, at the same time, to what made this guy tick and I was just so curious I couldn’t wait to figure it out.”
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