Jeremy Renner on the Emotional Layers of Mayor of Kingstown and Reuniting with Taylor Sheridan

After an extensive acting career in film that included detours into music (and even app development), Jeremy Renner is taking his first leading television role with Paramount+’s Mayor of Kingstown. The gritty crime drama about a Michigan town entrenched in the business of incarceration—created by Hell or Highwater and Yellowstone writer Taylor Sheridan and Hugh Denis—stars Renner as the titular mayor who reluctantly wields power over the corrupted city.

In a virtual roundtable interview, Renner spoke with journalists about making the transition to TV, noting “the big learning curve was it is every day and is relentless. And it just does not stop.” The actor went on to say that he felt a lot of the responsibility because “both [Mayor and Hawkeye] were anchored on the characters I played. And with that became the responsibility and the duties that come along with that […] setting the tone for the show, and how to work and work ethic; I’ll always work the hardest.”

The corruption-infested world of Mayor of Kingstown was also a challenge for building the character of Mike, which Renner spoke of as trying to find “some sort of grounded stand on the world that was pretty foreign to me… Once I got a grasp of that, then it was all the more emotional sort of context of the character that was very complex. With his fortitude and strength and his fearlessness and his actionability, all those types of things were, you know, all assets and characteristics that I like to play.”

Renner also discussed Mike’s reluctance to enter into this position of power, and if there will be a possibility of escape. “Short answer is no. No, he doesn’t want to fucking be there. [But] there’s the bleakness of the thing, and you don’t know what else to do. This is all you know, in your life, right? When you grew up in a town of prisons where everything in the town is about incarceration… you know, it’s like what else do you do? Where else do you go? Yeah, go to Florida. All your life is known and built around this sort of environment. And these people are products of that environment. So there’s a sadness and acceptance of this sort of thing.”