Slings and arrows

Renner’s career goes off in odd directions

Dressed in a plaid shirt and hiking boots, a man steadies himself as he grips a compound bow in his right hand and draws the string back with his left. He turns away from a nearby archery target and toward the mountains surrounding his lodge on Lake Tahoe, evaluating any and all hypothetical threats.

“The only law in nature is Mother Nature herself,” he thinks to himself, “so you want to be prepared.”

The man is not an arrow-slinging hero reacting to the catastrophic collapse of civilization as we know it, though he plays such a character in Avengers: Endgame. He is Jeremy Renner, the twotime Oscar nominee whose weird haircut in the Marvel film’s trailer launched a national debate earlier this year.

In recent months, Renner has expanded his professional horizons beyond the big screen, to the recording studio and, now, to the great outdoors. People magazine on Wednesday announced the launch of his Amazon collaboration “for the outdoorsman,” described in an article featuring promotional photos and quotes — like the one above — as a curated collection of sporting, camping and outdoor equipment.

“These items are all part of life out there,” he said of his Lake Tahoe cabin. It serves as an escape from his crazy life in Hollywood, where he claimed there are always “people coming at me.” (Chill out, #RenHive.)

The same could probably be said of People, the magazine, as it just last month landed another exclusive interview with Renner about an equally random endeavour: his summer TV campaign for Jeep, featuring several of his songs. He considers his sound to be “Imagine Dragons meets Queen.”

“My family was my first love, and then music,” he said at the time. “Acting came into my brain around 20. Music has always been my first love as far as something other than my family.”

Renner is a man of many interests, other than his family, and he pursues them all with an almost baffling level of earnestness. In June, he teased a new version of Dutch DJ Sam Feldt’s “heaven (Don’t Have a Name),” which, as several noted on Twitter, it most definitely does. The video begins with Renner singing the words, “So unpredictable, I gotta tell you, I’ll never be the same, ‘cause heaven don’t have a name” but, for an actor, he enunciates little, and instead sounds like he’s scatting, “So wa wi di da boop, I gotta telllllll you.” Edgy rock music swoops in, with clips of Renner yelling into a microphone and slamming piano keys.

Last month, Renner released a music video for another song that is much more Imagine Dragons than Queen, called Main Attraction. The video largely consists of him looking cool in a neon-lit club and frustrated in a desert. But then he and his band appear in a smaller, whimsical, child-filled venue, where Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi appears in a hot dog suit. Chaotic energy abounds!

The pivot to music might not have been surprising to Renner’s most loyal fans — those who closely follow his roles outside of Hawkeye and who subscribe to his app, which exists — given that he recorded a cover of Crash Test Dummies’ Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm for the end credits of Tag, a movie about a group of friends who play a game of tag that has lasted 30 years. (It’s the same movie where they had to CGI his arms because he broke them both while attempting a stunt on the second day of filming.)

But it’s fascinating nonetheless. Renner clearly has his hiking boot-clad feet planted in the “I do whatever the hell I want to do” territory of life, which appears to be near Lake Tahoe. It’s a luxury he can afford thanks to those handy dandy Marvel paycheques and, oh yeah, his lucrative house-flipping hobby.

Jeremy Renner