Spoilers for Season 3, Episode 1 of Mayor of Kingstown are ahead. If you haven’t seen it, you can stream it with a Paramount+ subscription.
A few weeks before Season 2 of Mayor of Kingstown premiered in 2023, Jeremy Renner was in a snowplow accident that seriously injured him, and for the last year and a half, he’s been recovering and documenting that journey. Now, he’s back in action, and his first major role on screen is in Season 3 of the aforementioned show – which just premiered on the 2024 TV schedule.
So, considering the journey he has been on, and the fact that his recovery journey has continued throughout production, I asked the Hawkeye star how this life-changing experience impacted his character Mike McLusky.
About a year after his accident, production on Kingstown’s junior season began. At the time, Renner posted that he was cautiously optimistic about getting back to work, and now he’s opening up about how his character has evolved between Seasons 2 and 3. The actor candidly told CinemaBlend that he “had to interject” what happened to him into this show, explaining:
Obviously, when you play a character, you have to interject a lot of some of your stuff into it, it doesn’t mean it’s all your stuff, but like there’s always some part of me in every character I play. Well, I already played his character for you know, two seasons. Now I have forced myself to interject some limitations of my physical body and all these things. I didn’t know if I was gonna have to make Mike limp. Like we thought about like, ‘Oh, he got shot in the leg or something happened he got piped or something right?’ We didn’t know if anything had to change. I had to interject things that are happening in my life that I just couldn’t avoid.
Honestly, if I didn’t know about everything Jeremy Renner has been through, I don’t think I would have noticed anything physically different about Mike. As he said, he figured out quickly how far he could push himself, and was happy when he found out he could still do some of the action he’s always been able to do:
And most of it was more emotional than it was physical that we found out pretty quickly in that first week of filming. [We found out] I could get back into that purposeful swagger of Mike’s walk, that worked.
Renner also told me that he was able to do a “little fight sequence” in Episode 1, which surprised him in the best way, and it made for an emotional day on set.
As the show’s star said, physically there are changes, but the bigger evolution for Mike is emotional. His relationships with his friends, family and colleagues are deeper and more intimate this season, which parallels Renner’s own life. He told me:
The opening of the show is the death of Mike’s mother, and the grieving of that, and then the explosion just to double down on it, and that is emotionally how I was kind of feeling inside anyway. Delicate, maybe a little broken, grieving perhaps, and that use that because it was kind of congruent with the narrative and it went throughout the storyline to all the other main players and their relationships with them and how that changes.
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Those changes, as we saw in the first episode, do happen across the entire show. Renner told me that he’s developed “deeper” and “more intimate” friendships in his own life, and that’s happened for the characters too. He explained that we’ll see Mike have deeper relationships with his brother Kyle, his colleague Ian as well as Bunny, and he has more delicate connections with people like Iris and Tracy, who just gave birth to his nephew.
Jeremy Renner has been clear about how the snowplow accident changed his life and the ups and downs that have come with recovery and getting back to work. However, that persistence has paid off as this new season of Mayor of Kingstown is a prime example of how far he’s come and evolved since that terrifying day in January 2023.
As the third season of Mayor of Kingstown continues to air, I’m excited to see these changes Jeremy Renner told me about. To see the show for yourself, you can catch new episodes on Paramount+ every Sunday.