In his first scene as Sgt. William James in Kathryn Bigelow’s much acclaimed The Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner is sitting on his bed with a cigarette in hand listening to loud heavy metal music. Like the music he listens to, James is stimulated by danger all around him.  As an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) specialist in the Iraq War, James has a swagger in his step and calm and cool under pressure attitude with every intense situation that follows. It is this performance that is getting universal praise from critics and in addition to nominations by many awards groups thus far, is responsible for Renner’s first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
It’s been a long road for the film since it first appeared at The Venice Film Festival and The Toronto International Film Festival in 2008. I recently spoke with actor on the phone from Los Angeles about the film and his success, “It’s been really gratifying…the critics really got it off the ground.” The 39 year old from Modesto, California continues, “It’s been a tremendous blessing that it’s rolled out so slow to allow us to kind of really bask in a lot of it…this slow roll has ended up being a really great gift.”
When asked to comment on why The Hurt Locker has succeeded critically while so many other films about the Iraq experience have failed, Renner has a theory, “It’s not really an Iraq War film. It’s about three guys with a really interesting job which happens to be relevant. EOD really separates this for me from any Iraq War film that’s been made. The same with The Messenger, the Iraq War is the backdrop but it’s not really about that, it’s about these guys doing some harrowing job, having to tell people that their sons or daughters are dead…it focuses on that, a very specific sort of thing without having a message. Renner continues, “I think it allows the audience, empowers the audience to think and to feel and not force anything else…I don’t think movies should be made for a soap box. That’s just my opinion. Cinema should be for cinema. Save it for a documentary if you really want to make a statement about something.”
In preparing for the role Renner trained with an EOD team, “They pretty much taught me all the ropes. How to essentially build a bomb and how to render safe an IED (Improvised Explosive Device)….all the technical stuff which was really interesting and important. But then they came to my place in LA and stayed with me and we got to hang out on a personal level and I got to know them as individuals which was a little more informing as well….they were saying that EOD really stands for ‘Everyone is Divorced’. It was kind of an ongoing thing that it does ruin a lot of marriages.”
Bigelow shot the film for three months during the summer in Amman Jordan and Renner had to wear a 100 pound protective suit in many of the scenes with temperatures of 125 degrees or more. “It’s sort of a spiritual and mental sort of torture than a physical thing. We would have to stop and rehydrate 10 to 15 minutes after every take essentially, because our shots were about 15 minutes long….get a cold towel on my head real quick and get the helmet on and go do that again.”  On working with Bigelow, “This is the only movie I’ve done where I’ve had so much time to prepare and spend with Kathryn… So I got to know her really well for about a year from when I first talked to her and Mark (Boal, writer) about the script. It’s great, I got to know her as a person…she trusted me to do my thing and felt I was the only one to do the job and with that empowered me to take that and run with that.”
Renner’s charismatic and intense performance as Sgt. James brings to mind comparisons to actors like Steve McQueen and Russell Crowe and Renner takes this as a compliment, “Those are people I also look up to…and Sean Penn, all the great actors around.” Renner continues, “It’s fantastic to be compared to them because those are the kind of careers I always wanted to have and now I may have the opportunity to kind of build upon and not just play some movie star’s best friend….kind of play some interesting cool kind of anti-hero, complicated rich characters, hopefully, if that’s the case.”
Renner comments on how this role has changed his career,  “A lot of people in the business have known who I was for a long time but now they have a little bit of courage or whatever it is and say, “Now we can actually cast him.” Yeah, I get more scripts, directors are taking more notice and other actors…it’s been really great.”
Even though success is getting him through more doors than before Renner states, “I am going to stick to my guns and do the things I still love to do and now I just have more opportunities to do it.”