Jeremy Renner’s career recently took a turn when he signed on for the Taylor Sheridan and Hugh Dillon co-created series, Mayor of Kingstown, which opened to a highly receptive host of audience and critics alike. With the Sheridan business booming elsewhere parallel to the aforementioned show, it has been a couple of years of peak television and spectacular storytelling with not a single moment of dull narration marring the script or hindering the plot development.
In fact, not only does the Paramount+ series shine the Hawkeye star in all his untamed potential, but also unravels his enigmatic portrayal in a tense show where good and bad are merely relative terms and at the end of the day, you simply root for Renner to win.
Is Marvel Undermining the Potential of Jeremy Renner?
The industry has a diverse and ever-expanding array of potential that only are in need of being presented with the right opportunity at the right time. Jeremy Renner was the ideal candidate for the role of Hawkeye when the MCU role crossed his path in early 2010. With a spectacular start in Thor (2011), the actor went on to appear next in the team-up event, The Avengers, in 2012. But with time, the bow and arrow-wielding superhero, who held his own in a crushing Battle of New York against the full-scale attack from demigods and aliens, was treated more as an expendable Avenger rather than one that is elemental to the team’s victory.
Also read: Disney+’s Hawkeye Is The Best MCU Hawkeye Yet!
Over the following few years, the fandom enjoyed a running joke about Hawkeye being fundamental to the Avengers as every battle that Clint Barton was absent from ended up losing to the opposition – “The Avengers are 7-0 in battles that include Hawkeye. They are 0-4 in battles either against him or without him.” Outside the fictional world of MCU, people soon began pointing out the impossibility of having one of Earth’s mightiest heroes bringing outdated weaponry to an intergalactic war against titans.
But what does Jeremy Renner himself think about all of this and do his feelings about Marvel’s apparent under-utilization of his character align with that of the mass consensus? In an interview with Ali Plumb, the actor says,
“[Hawkeye] is consistent like gravity, like student debt. Whether you like it or not, he’s always [there], like the guy that might pick you up at the airport […] He was the head of West Coast Avengers. I would personally love to see him be in that sort of Captain America leader role, actually which I think he would succeed in – calling the shots and do these types of things, like a quarterback instead of being more like a wide receiver.
That would be really interesting, I think, to see him do. But I love the accessibility of this character because he is a superhero that has no superpowers [yet] he makes it accessible as a human and I think that’s a wonderful message to say to kids – Why is he a superhero? What action does he do? Well, it’s selfless, it’s this, it’s serving others, it’s that. And these are pretty good attributes for a superhero that I think a lot of people could acquire.”
Marvel critics and commentators have been unflinching in pointing out that Hawkeye is “a superhero with no superpowers” and perhaps, classically speaking, the original 6 created in the mid-20th century by Marvel Comics writers deserve to be represented on the big screen, but the same logic does not apply to understanding why the studio wouldn’t extensively utilize the diverse potential of a highly skilled S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and instead fall back on a 5-minute introduction of Ronin, so to speak.
Jeremy Renner Shines Bright in Mayor of Kingstown
When the ingenious, terrifying, and brilliant brain of Taylor Sheridan cooks up a platter of brutal and gory delicacy, one knows full well that what’s about to unfold in front of their eyes is sheer cinematic delight. Even though the unrestricted capacity of morbidity that Sheridan is ready to foray into might not be suited to everyone’s taste, it definitely helps to satiate the audience who are on the lookout for something a bit edgier than most shows that populate modern television.
Also read: 8 MCU Hawkeye Action Scenes That Prove Why He’s the Avengers’ Winning Factor
The collaboration of Jeremy Renner and Taylor Sheridan began on the sub-zero sets of Wind River in 2017, where the Marvel veteran paired up with co-star Elizabeth Olsen to unravel a small-town macabre murder. This time around, however, Renner runs the show in the Paramount+ series, alongside incredible supporting performances delivered by Kyle Chandler, Aiden Gillen, Dianne Wiest, and Emma Laird, as he storms brazenly through a town where he is the king and “the real mayor knows it too.”
Hawkeye is available for streaming on Disney+ and his current series, Mayor of Kingstown, is streaming on Paramount+.
Source: BBC Radio 1
