Ray Richmond: Jeremy Renner a profile in courage, on and off the ‘red’ carpet
When you cover entertainment, you learn that things aren’t often what they seem. Everyone cleans up nice and puts on their best face and threads to project an image, an idea, a point of view that’s more perception than reality. Marketing and promotion are king. If done with the proper sincerity, they can convince you that a blue carpet is in fact red, leaving you to wonder if your eyes are deceiving you or if deception is simply built into the presentation.
In fact, this was the case Tuesday night at the Westwood Regency Village Theatre in Westwood. The red carpet was actually a blue one. But it turned out that was the only inauthentic part of what went down at an event designed to promote the premiere of a new (streaming today) four-part Disney+ series entitled “Rennervations,” a play on words that focuses on the charitable mission of a dude named Jeremy Renner.
When I’d heard about the premiere kickoff, I’d wrongly assumed there wasn’t a chance in hell Renner himself would be there to represent his show in person. How could he? Little more than three months before, he lay dying in a hospital bed after having been run over by a 14,330-pound Sno-Cat snowplow on New Year’s Day. The accident happened when Renner tried to jump back into it to keep it from hitting his nephew Alex. He saved Alex but in the process sacrificed himself. The result was more than 30 broken bones and a brush with death that left him in critical condition. One of his eyes popped clear out of its socket as a result of the impact.
This was, let’s remember, a 51-year-old man (now 52) struggling to survive a crushed chest. Somehow, Renner pulled through, leaving him with a long and painful road to physical recovery – to say nothing of the emotional toll. It seemed inconceivable the guy could possibly show up to represent his show barely 14 weeks after the accident. But we’d clearly underestimated the level of determination in Jeremy Renner – and just how important this show had been in his recovery.
“Rennervations” is the punny name of a show near and dear to Renner’s heart. It finds he and a team of fellow builders and guest stars repurposing, reimagining and renovating decommisioned vehicles, such as a tour bus being converted into a mobile music studio (the subject of the premiere) or a delivery truck into a mobile water treatment facility. It’s all about giving back to the nonprofit world, something the Marvel Cinematic Universe star has helped dedicate his life to.
But it still didn’t seem feasible that Renner would actually show up on the blue carpet to run the promotional gauntlet. The best anyone might have expected was a video playing after the screening, shot from his easy chair at home. Yet there he was at 6 p.m., an hour before the screening was set to begin, walking with support from a cane but ready to rock and roll, rather miraculously.
In case you don’t know how the red carpet world works, this is how: the media outlets deemed most important are stacked at the front of the line, as it were, in case the star has the time and/or patience to do only a few interviews. This is often the case. There are typically abundant escape routes built into the carpet, so any personality can duck out at a moment’s notice. This often leaves the press stacked toward the latter end of the carpet (say, Gold Derby) stuck holding the mic with no one to talk to.
This was running through my mind as I eyed Renner starting to work the carpet. I saw that after moving down the carpet a bit, he ditched the cane in favor of a motorized scooter. It seemed unlikely he’d make it all the way to the real estate that we (my esteemed social media associate Jaclyn Ben-Porat and myself) were holding down. We were continually assured that Renner had every intention of speaking to everyone present – even the dregs at the end of the line, despite his fragile physical state.
Sure enough, he made it to our position in short order, preceded by the edict that each outlet be restricted to two questions and none about his accident. He arrived with his lovely young daughter Ava by his side and was looking surprisingly spry and dapper in a blue suit with tie slightly askew. I asked him where his spirit of giving back emanates from.
“Well, I have a 10-year-old brother,” Renner said, “and I grew up with kids. My job is I play make-believe for a living and it’s very kid-like…There’s some beautiful inspiration for me in that kind of world I’m blessed to be in, and I want to inspire kids, give them an opportunity or help them in any way. Some are in dire straits, but there are quite a few where it’s an easy fix. You put in the time, one hour a week, and it shifts that kid forever. I don’t know many things in life that are that guaranteed.
At this point, Renner started to get a little emotional.
“So I want to get other people inspired And that happened while we were filming on the show, which brought me to tears.”
Renner had earlier told The Hollywood Reporter that “the show became a wonderful milestone for me to aim towards for me to aim towards for my physical health, for me to be here to share the story, to share this journey, and it’s been quite an honor to do so.” He had also told Variety that he wasn’t going to allow his condition to prevent him from walking the carpet and keeping the “Rennervations” launch on track.
After the well-received screening of the first episode, Jimmy Kimmel moderated a panel discussion during which Kimmel observed that if he were Renner, “I would be complaining, I would be whining, I would never have gotten out of bed. It’s remarkable what you’ve done.” An emotional Renner replied, “Without the love and support I have, it would have been impossible. A big part of my recovery was this show. It set as a milestone for me to get better, to make sure all of this hard work wasn’t for naught. It was important that I had somewhere to go, something to point toward.”
As his motorized scooter helped guide him off the carpet, there was a moment when Renner stopped, looked around and seemed to take in the enormity of what he’d accomplished just in making it there at all. His eyes moistened a bit and he released a big lungful of air, which just a month or so before would have filled him with pain. On this night, it filled him with pride instead. As it should.
And for one night, cynicism was dead.
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