TIFF 2010: Toronto International Film Festival

Star of The Town, Jeremy Renner (WENN.COM) Review: The Town

Jeremy Renner is probably going to be giving up his second job.

Until recently, the hard-working character actor was also renovating and selling houses on the side for extra income.

The Oscar-winning Hurt Locker changed all that last year. These days, Renner is looking forward to roles in Mission: Impossible 4, The Avengers and a new P.T. Anderson movie, The Master.

And this month he stars in The Town, with Ben Affleck. Affleck also directed.

The Town, set in Boston's down-at-heel Charlestown, is a gritty crime drama about a bank robber (Affleck) who falls in love with the bank employee he takes as a hostage. Affleck is a career thief hoping to change his life, and Renner co-stars as his criminal sidekick, a friend from childhood who is closer than a brother and determined to keep his buddy in the robbery game.

The intense, intelligent film also stars Rebecca Hall, Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper. It's a gala presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival this Saturday night.

For everybody else, The Town opens in theatres on Sept. 17.

"I'm pretty low maintenance," says Renner, 39, when he phones up from Los Angeles to promote The Town -- a phone call he makes without benefit of publicist, manager or handler of any type. Asked how his life has changed since The Hurt Locker, Renner says, "More of everything."

He says, "It's hard to understand how people perceive you and what that is, but for me, that's the only thing that's really changed -- the amount of things, whether it be interviews, job opportunities or people who recognize you. It's been a massive leap for me in my life," he concedes, "but it's glorious to be able to do what you love to do, and especially when you're so proud of what you're doing, like with Hurt Locker or The Town. You know, I got to do something I love to do and people also dug it. It's nice, man."

A lot of people have been digging Renner's work since he started in movies in '95 with Senior Trip. Okay, maybe not Senior Trip specifically, but by the time he appeared in such films as Dahmer, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All things, Neo Ned, North Country or The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford, the theatre-trained Renner had made his presence -- and his complex characters -- known.

He's on a roll, and he's enjoying it.

"I'm 39 and I've been doing it for 20 years, and I feel ready," he says, sounding laid-back and cheerful. "They called me up to bat and it's the bottom of the ninth and I have two strikes on me, and I'm swinging for the fence, you know? I've been ready, I felt, for a long time, working and loving it. It doesn't change because people all of a sudden recognize you or recognize your work. There's no added pressure."

Renner grew up in Modesto, Calif. His parents, Lee Renner and Valerie Cearley, were teenagers themselves when they married and they were divorced when Renner was about 10 -- although they keep houses across the street from one another. Renner is the oldest of five kids. Last year, when he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, his date for the Academy Awards was his mom.

"I always had support from my family in whatever I did. They believed in me and trusted me. I had a lot of encouragement to explore what I want to explore. My father didn't put any pressure on me ... He said, 'Whatever you do, just love really love it. I want you to skip to work.' He allowed me to succeed. He set the bar high for me. It forced me to want to be the best, for myself. Kind of, the sky's the limit."

Only six months into his college career, Renner took a drama course as an elective. He told his father right away that he thought he'd found what his dad had been talking about -- something he felt passionate about.

"I felt very lucky. Everything about my life has been very Cinderella in a lot of ways, and against a lot of adversity. For me, the biggest voice in it all has always been the work, and you know it will speak eventually, somehow, some way, if you just continue to give and to grow."

As for all the big movies he's got coming up, Renner says, "I get overwhelmed when I think about the whole gamut, so right now I'm just focused on Mission Impossible. I'll start training for it this afternoon. Tom (Cruise) has been nothing but an amazing champion and a giving human being, and he's the main reason I'm doing it."

Is it fair to assume that Renner will stop renovating houses for a while?

"It's getting a little too much now," he says. "My brother and I just finished a house, and he'll do projects on his own, but I'm not going to have time now. I'm jammed up a bit with movies. And it's great!"

Renner’s celeb encounter at the urinal

Jeremy Renner may be taking his newfound celebrity in stride, but he freely admits that there have been a few defining moments in his meteoric rise since The Hurt Locker.

“And one was at a urinal with Mark Wahlberg,” he says, deadpan.

“That sounds weird,” he adds, laughing, “but it was a turning moment. I don’t know Mark at all, but there we were at the urinal and he said something like, ‘Hey Renner, welcome man, I’m so glad for you, you’ve arrived.’ More what he said was, ‘It’s about time.’ And I was like, ‘Wow’. That spoke volumes. That told me he’d seen other things I’d done. Or liked them. That’s amazing, that you’re in someone’s conscious mind — like when a Beatle knows who the heck you are, and says, ‘Dude I’m so star-struck right now.’”

Renner laughs with delight at the memory of Paul McCartney approaching him at the Golden Globes.

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about! You’re a Beatle!’ I was thinking, ‘Is this real life?’ Moments like that are so surreal. It’s like when Jack Nicholson sits down and says something really nice. It’s just bizarre, when there are people you’ve respected in life and you’re in their consciousness.

“Sean Penn was the first one, a guy I really respect as an actor, and he came up to me and said my name, and I can’t remember what he said after that. The whole time I’m thinking, ‘Sean Penn knows my name? What?!’ There are a lot of those moments that make you feel like, wow, you’ve arrived or joined some kind of club or something. I don’t know what the heck it is. It’s amazing. And it’s fun.”

liz.braun@sunmedia.ca