Jeremy Renner On ‘Wind River,’ Working With Elizabeth Olsen [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

Jeremy Renner spoke exclusively with uInterview about his role in upcoming film Wind River, directed by Taylor Sheridan.

JEREMY RENNER EXCLUSIVE

The film opens with Renner’s character Cory finding a girl’s dead body while hunting on an Indian reservation in Wyoming. “Upon investigating it, he realizes he knows this girl, and it’s his best friend’s daughter,” Renner explains. “So the feds are brought in to figure out who did it, and she’s played by Elizabeth Olsen. She sort of hires me, or asks me to help her navigate the vast world on the reservation.”

Of working with Olsen, Renner said he had a blast. “She’s such a trooper, she was on the picture for a good 9 months prior to me getting involved in, o she did a lot of gun training so I was always really impressed by how much dedication and how much time spent to make the character really believable. She crossed all her t’s and dotted al her Is and she was on point, and she just a lovely human to collaborate with… it was something that we had to work together intimately in the snow… and then we’d go have a nice glass of wine and a nice meal at the end of the day, and hit repeat, and keep doing it, it’s fantastic.”

“I was really attracted initially to the writing and the landscape and also just dealing with loss… where does fortitude come from, how is it built,” Renner explained of his interest in the script. Much of the film focuses violence against Native American women, as well as toward Natives Americans in general, a cause that Renner feels strongly about. “There were a lot of things that were important to me, and I never want to scream and shout from a soap box about anything topical, I’d want to actually show it. It’s topical, just about life for indigenous people and reservation life, just for women in general.”

Renner also talked about how he first got his start in acting. “I guess it was in a community theater, where I learned that acting was a thing when I was a kid. I got hired from my acting class to go work at that same college at the police academy to help them do real world life training events, [like] a disturbance call or something, or pay me fifty bucks to beat someone up… I was like awesome, this is a cool job,” the actor laughed.