Spoilers for the Season 3 premiere of Mayor of Kingstown are ahead! If you aren’t caught up, you can stream it with a Paramount+ subscription. Then catch new episodes as they air on the 2024 TV schedule every Sunday.
Jeremy Renner’s Mike McLusky has dealt with his fair share of tragedy. However, the punch he faced in the Season 3 premiere of losing his mother mixed with the news that his brother’s child was born was one of the most emotionally complex situations he’s ever been in on Mayor of Kingstown. Now, as the season continues, it’s clear to me that Mike will be impacted by these developments deeply, so I had to ask the actor behind the Mayor about what’s to come.
In the Season 3 premiere, Mike said he’s never good, but he’s an uncle now. That felt like a loaded statement, so I asked Jeremy Renner about it when I interviewed him for Mayor of Kingstown’s junior season. Between the tragedy of losing his mom and the birth of Kyle’s kid, it marks a major turning point in the Mayor’s life, and the actor commented on how the questions that come out of all this will percolate throughout the season. He told me:
He has a resentment that the baby is birthed because of the death his mom is a rebirth. But like, what’s the baby birthed into, right? He knows the future of this, right? He tried to get Iris out in Season 1. ‘Get out of here.’
Throughout Kingstown, we’ve seen Mike urge Iris to get out, and we’ve seen him and his brother contemplate the consequences of staying in their hometown. So, the death of their mother – which happened because Kyle accidentally shot her as they were being attacked in her home while trying to take down Aidan Gillen’s Milo – really re-emphasized how violent and dangerous this town is.
So, even though having a baby in the family should be incredibly exciting, Mike is especially aware of what he’s been born into, and he doesn’t like it. To that point, Renner told me:
Now it’s like he’s excited about the beauty of this boy being born, named Mitch after the dead brother. But I think it’s the overall theme of what the show is and like his quiet sorrow about is like ‘What do you what is your future? Right? What are the hopes for the child?’ And that’s kind of the underlying theme, I think, of the show all the time.
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One time, co-creator Hugh Dillon described a big moment in Kingstown as a “Taylor Sheridan moment,” meaning it was big, game-changing and unexpected. The death of Mike’s mom felt like that, and when you add in the birth of Mitch, Mike’s nephew (who is named after his late brother), it only adds to the already complex situation at hand.
As the show goes on, I’m curious to see how these two big life events change Mike’s outlook on life. Will he still compartmentalize and move forward? Will he actually change his ways and seek out a more peaceful existence? That last question seems unlikely, but one can hope, especially when we consider all the tragedy he’s faced throughout the show.
Season 3 is only just getting started, so we’ll see how this death and birth impact Mike in the weeks to come, and you better believe CinemaBlend will be here to cover it. While we wait for the next episode to air on Sunday, you can check out our other coverage of Mayor of Kingstown, including our story about how Jeremy Renner’s real-life injuries impacted Mike on the show.