Woooo, I just bought mine from Chapter's today after work and oooh beibe...our guy looks gorgeous as usual
for everyone who hasn't bought it yet or can't get it where you live....voilà ladies!
It was Jeremy Renner's idea to come here, to a piano bar called Piano Bar, the kind of joint where he can swill a Ketel One and croon some Billy Joel and, if it so happens, go a little overboard without landing on TMZ. Hollywood is lurking just outside-both the newly dolled-up Hollywood and the perpetually seedy version-but no eyes are on him at Piano Bar. It has the feel of a neighbourhood saloon, dark, bluesy, cheap, perfect for a man unwilling to be anything but himself. "It's very anti-Hollywood here," says Renner, steering me to the nearly deserted piano. "If we were somewhere where there's, like, paparazzi, you'd be in the paper"-and here he predicts how a photo of us would be spun-"We're f**king*!" I laugh at the absurdity of the leap, but we both know the Web is swirling with sightings and speculations about his private life, all juvenile stuff. The dude is 39, not some flavor-of-the-month pretty boy. He has spent the last decade playing complex and unpredictable characters-a serial killer, a neo-Nazi-the most celebrated of them being the hope-to-die bomb disposal specialist of The Hurt Locker.
This month he toys with expectations again in The Town, a film directed by Ben Affleck in which Renner plays a manic yet sensitive bank robber in Boston's working class Irish quarter. "I've worked so hard to be respected," says the Oscar nominee, who has the slightly elastic face and roguish eyes of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. "I don't need some tabloid running off with something just because I got drunk some night and showed I disagree to the bartender."
Renner is the one to laugh now. Fame is new, a mystery still. Image is not a worry he has over lost sleep over. "I'm just getting to learn it, brother," he says. "I'm learning as I go."
The kid is 16, a product of Modesto-the safe suffocating San Joaquin Valley town that inspired the setting for American Graffiti-and his mother, on her second of three husbands, enlists him as her Lamaze coach. He has to come straight from soccer practice, grass stains on his knees, and sit with her at the Y, learning to breathe in unison. "At the time, I was like, 'Oh my God, this sucks,'" says Renner, the oldest of five. "'Why am I watching videos of these girl thingys squirting out all these fluid?' (A/N: no wonder he had 19 years of emotional repression!) It was terrifying." Years would pass before the traumatized adolescent could see the beauty of birth. Give the choice, he would have opted to remain in the dark about episiostomies a bit longer. But the experience of learning the hard way-enduring, finding value in sacrifice-offered lessons that he would apply many times over. "What a gift I was given," he says.
Renner carried those lessions to Modesto Junior College, where he took his first theatre class. "Nineteen years of emotional repression," as he is fond of saying, came pouring out on the stage, a catharsis he knew was worth repeating. He was nudged by his father, a Cal State administrator with a background in theosophy, and then by esteemed acting coach Julie Ariola. They both taught him that self-awareness is more important to success than any single skill.
"If you don't know who you are, how the hell are you going to be able to...?" Renner leaves the thought unfinished, but it would be easy to fill in the blank with a million possibilies, most of them more profound than becoming a movie star. "So I made a very conscious decisions to be fearless, to live a life os fear-freeness. I decided to something everyday I was afraid of."
Like?
"I swam with sharks," he says, recounting a scuba trip off California's southern coast. "I was terrifiled of sharks and I'm still terrifiled of sharks, but at least I was taking acting‒and not being squelched by something I don't know about."
To fight complacency, Renner developed a tool he calls a "life awareness chart." Draw a circle on a sheet of paper. Divide it, like a pie chart, into percentages: time spent working, time spent not working, time spent pregnant doging about not work.
"It taks 10 seconds to do, but now you can really assess, like, 'Okay, look here, ass nuts, you spent a third of your year in a bar, getting drunk, singing karaoke-this is me I'm talking about right?-and so now it's 'Oh, wait, I have to be accountable,'" says Renner, who has gone from pointing at my legal pad to jabbing a finger into my chest. His closest friends do charts, too, and then pass them among each other, offering interpretations, making challenges: "Be more communicative." "Lose the gut." "Grow a beard."
"Whatever it might be," he says, "now it's tangible. It's not a thought swimming in my head or a feeling in my heart. It exists on this paper. I own it."
After moving to L.A. in his his early 20s, Renner needed all the wisdom he could summon. He wanted roles that were nourishing and authentic, not mindless fun, a standard that left him teetering on the brink of indigence. While holding out, he survived on two-for-29-cent burgers from McDonald's. For months at a stretchm his utilities were cut-water, power-forcing him to camp in his own apartment. Even when he was cast in Dahmer, the 2002 biopic that earned him a Spirit Award nomination, the rewards were strictly creative. His pay: $50 a day.
"You could call it making sacrifices," he says, "but those sacrifices made me who I am, so I don't know if I'd consider them sacrifices or blessings."
These days there are more opportunities, but also more opportunities to go astray. He refused to settle when times were tough. Now that he is in demand, he is even more determined not to let money dictate his choices. "My plan is to be able to do what I want to do when I want to do it, and not because I have to," says Renner. "I call it my 'pull-chute' plan. That's a military thing, you know...time to pull chute, like time, to kind of float and enjoy the view."
That may sound risky, and maybe it is, which is why Renner some years ago turned to real estate.
Even in a depressed economy, he earns more money flipping houses-gutting, remodeling, decorating-than he does making movies. He and his investment partner, actor Kristoffer Winters, started with $650,000 place. Fifteen properties later, they are selling $4 million Greek Revivals, usually living in the construction site until a buyer takes it off their hands. "During the Academy Awards, I was sleeping under painter's plastic in a guest apartment with no plumbing, and I had to go brush my teeth at Starbucks," says Renner, whose mother, now a retired bookkeeper, was his date for the ceremony.
This leaves little time for the gym, but climbing ladderes and spackling ceilings is a worthy workout: At 5-foot-10, Renner is still the same sinewy 160 pounds he was when he finished high school. He eats better than he did during those Mickey D years, or when he feels indulgent, has at least graduated to the haute beef of $12 burger bars. After all, on that pie chart he draws of his life, there must be times he can forget about money-and paparazzi.
"Sometimes," says Renner, ordering another vodka and eyeing the piano, "I just kind of want to have fun and be unconscious for a while."
And the second article:
Jeremy Renner's everyman quality helps him play almost any character: rugged miner, sadistic killer, bomb-unit rogue. It's a kind of blessing, because generic Hollywood looks might have sentenced him to generic romantic comedies. Quirkier looks might have confined him to oddball roles.
As it happens, his skills and features have served him well in the dark parts, including a turn in the upcoming crime thriller, The Town. Renner plays a tough career criminal and best friend to gang leader Ben Affleck, who directed the film. Renner's character is a wild card with an edge.
"I like anti-heroes," says Renner, 39. "It's hard for me to do something fluffy and light. It doesn't have to be heavy by any means, but my character has to be complex."
Finding that character is a different process each time. Sometimes it's as simple as putting a rock in his shoe to change his gait. For his breakout role in the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, he connected with Sgt. First Class William James when he donned a 75-pount bomb-disposal suit in 100-degree heat. "It was a massive discovery for me-and what a great gift for uncovering my character," says Renner, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the role.
In The Town, he found the mindset in hair and wardrobe: a close cropped cut, sweat pants and gold jewelry. "I would never, ever wear that stuff," he says, "but it made me feel, like, so outside of myself. I felt like such a thug."
Off the set, working on his side business building and remodeling homes, Renner the star isn't much different from Renner the guy who went to Modesto Junior College. He'll change the look with a nice coat or jacket. "I love a great jacket with boots and jeans-that's a uniform for me," he says.
Just as Renner puts his own stamp on a character, he likes to make what he wears unique. He's been known to combine unlikely elements, like sharp three-piece suit and beat-up boots. "You can just throw on a nice suit, but that doesn't represent who someone is," he says. "I prefer to show some creativity and mix it up with whatever feels right."
He'll have a plain white shirt altered by a tailor. "It's like building a house, or anything, really," he says. "That's just how my mind is built. I think about the shingles on a roof or the piping on a couch or leather on a jacket. That's also how I am as an actor. I pay attention to the details, and that reflects in everything I do."
Hope you enjoyed, girls!
i found the address on the men's health website you can order back issues....or maybe one of us can get you a copy and mail it to you.
Awesome doll thanks for that