Last week, Jeremy Renner finally got around to confirming that he married his baby-mama Sonni Pacheco. He confirmed it during a magazine interview to promote his latest film, Kill the Messenger. There was some cognitive dissonance there – Jeremy was talking about how no one needs to know anything about his personal life, but he’s still talking about his personal life while promoting his film (a film about journalism). I’m not going to make a big deal about it because… well, most celebrities do it. It’s just what happens. Anyway, Renner gave a new, lengthy interview to The Daily Beast and he talks a lot about his personal life, about hacked phones and much, much more. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
Information Age: “Why I steer away from media in general is because I’m sickened by what gets attention—like sensationalism, hacked celebrity phones, etc. It makes me feel terrible to be a human. What’s a headline anymore? We can say we’re at war, and then it’s something else that comes up two days later, and then it’s gone. A lot of it has to do with technology, too. I think it’s a travesty for our youth that we’re born with cellphones in our hands and have access to all the information that adults do. You didn’t earn it, and you don’t deserve it—it just fell in your g–damn lap. Information should be earned. What is actually earned today?”
He hates the Pundit Class: “I hate that. ‘Here’s a penny for your thoughts…’ Get out of here! I don’t give a sh-t about your opinion! Punditry is completely ridiculous, as is speculation. Why are you speculating on things? Just deliver the news and report the facts. But with the 24-hour news cycle now, they just use speculation as filler until they actually get some real news to report on. It’s why I can’t really watch the news, man.”
On sleep: “I almost never get any sleep. I get about 2, 3 hours a night.”
Whether he’s concerned that his phone will be hacked: “I mean… if it were a few years ago, I’d have a bunch of naked pictures of girls. But now, the only pictures of naked girls on my phone are of my baby! And hey, if you take pictures of my naked little baby girl, I’m coming after you. I’m going to hurt you. I’ll hurt you.”
On the idea that there should be more female leads in film: “Sure. I absolutely agree. I love strong female characters, and I think it’s really important. Another reason why I got involved with Kill the Messenger is that there are strong female roles in this, and I actually wanted them to be stronger than they ended up being in the movie—like my editor in the film, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Strong female roles in cinema are hugely important to me. A lot of them seem to just service the guy, and it’s a travesty. You need to strike a good balance between the men and women in a movie, because that’s when things really ignite.”
There’s a lot of stuff about Marvel in the interview too… he doesn’t confirm that he’s in Captain America 3, which I guess was a rumor going around. He basically says that if Hawkeye ever gets his own stand-alone film, it will probably include a lot of Black Widow too. He says his Marvel contract is for three Avengers films and one Hawkeye film, which is interesting. Didn’t Chris Hemsworth have to, like, sign away his life to Marvel? I think Hemsworth has a nine-film contract, which is probably why he always looks so grumpy.
As for the rest of it… I don’t agree that “information has to be earned” – I think “the Information age” is a good thing for the most part, but the kidz just need to learn how to be discerning about what is and is not real life, real information, etc. Oh, and I guess Renner used to like to take naked photos of his ladies. Or he just likes to be sent naked photos from his ladies. Good to know.
Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.
I don’t really understand what he means about earning information? how do adults earn it compared with children…they grew up?
Yeah that seemed odd, or perhaps poorly worded, to me as well.
My interpretation is that Jeremy means information is not just too accessible but the worth and appreciation (of knowing) is then decreased because of the ‘lack of’ effort it took to acquire it? (idk) Ex. all of the answers for basically everything and anything academic are available on the internet.
I know. Maybe it’s his chronic sleep deprivation talking. Maybe he means we “earned” it by having to seek it out on our own? Walking to the library in the snow? In any case, we had access to everything adults did then too. Unless he’s talking about pron?
Once his kid gets older he will realize that it’s not as simple as having everything at your fingertips, you still have to filter through stuff and find sources that are legit and relevant. They don’t just magically appear on your phone.
I took it to mean that people were more rigorous in acquiring information, they actually performed research from multiple sources and there was an aspect of labor involved before one arrived at a conclusion as opposed to someone performing a couple of google searches.
@renee-
That’s how I took it too.
Word salad. He is not that intellectually deep
It’s like a stream of consciousness of woolly thinking, reading that.
Information should be AVAILABLE and privacy should be RESPECTED and the inevitable grey areas should be um – oh, you know, what with it being a free society an’ all – DEBATED.
How’s that?
Much better, well done Mrs. Sixer. 🙂
Good translation!
Hmm. That’s an improvement, but I think you’re being very generous with his dubious logic. He can’t say that information should be earned, and then condemn punditry. One earns information by being critically discerning, and understanding that much “information” probably isn’t “information” and should be assessed critically.
I think the more accurate interpretation is “leave celebrities alone and stop watching Fox news” (and maybe a little sub-textual “waaaah”).
@ Fanty (Hello darling, are you good?) I guess I wasn’t so much trying to translate as to correct! But yes, I’d agree that the most accurate inference is that he is speaking of information about HIM and his entertainment business ilk, not information generally. Such is the self-regarding tunnel vision of fame!
Hallo my lovely. I’m fine, thanks. How are you?
I’m good. I’m 40 next week. Eurgh.
You are?!?! Congrats! I’m 39 this week! I hate feeling old. I’m ready to start lying about it.
Lol @ T.Fanty.
I’m so sick of him talking about not talking about his private life! Shut up already!
I didn’t understand his comment about information needing to be earned. How do you earn information? I only had about 2-3 hours of sleep last night, and unlike Jeremy, I’m not used to it and my brain feels like peach fuzz.
You said peach fuzz.
Lol. Sleep deprivation.
Maybe he means that it took time to get some information when he was a kid or teen. Nowadays you can look up just anything online, every information is just a click away – BUT that is a good thing. Information shouldn’t be earned, it should be given. It doesn’t change the value of the information just because it is easy to get, you just have to make something out of it.
Thank you, I agree.
I agree, too, @greenmonster. Moreover, I think that easy access to information is or particular importance to people in developing countries. That’s basically the absolutely necessary precondition for their progress.
what he means is KNOWLEDGE and that must not be earned. ridiculous. its fantastic that we have access to almost all of the knowledge. with a little device you can carry around!
the problem is that most people dont use it.
how would it work anyway? what do i have to do to earn it? star in movies about men with super powers?
thats the real tragedy, never in the history was learning stuff easier and more accessible, people fought for their right, in lots of countries people dont have access to it, in some girls are banned from going to school.
back in the days or still in countries like England and the USA the knowledge is basically shielded away from the poor. thats why studying costs so much in both countries, to keep the lower class from rising. therefore smartphone and the internet are a fantastic invention, it gets knowledge to people who still have a lot of obstacles to climb to simply get an education. which is a human right.
the fact checking nowadays is true but it was always true. not long ago most countries basically had only two newspaper and one “trusted” man on tv. that means it was all incredibly biased. if you go to the library and read books you’ll also have to double check it because just because its printed in a book doesnt make it true.
maybe its a generational thing with Jeremy, most people his age dont have a deep distrust of big media like younger people have.
Emma Watson spoke about her being treated equally by teachers and alike, what she left out was that she is a born 1%. she once complained that they were poor too because her father could only give her pencils for the birthday after the divorce, yeah because she went to a school that costs more than most people earn in a year. THAT is the whole problem which she still does not understand or that she does not want to acknknowledge. she was able to get a good education, a woman who is smarter than Emma but poor wouldnt have got there. (oh yeah if she got lucky and some rich old men paid for her…)
The trouble with the 24 hour news cycle is that it’s like a ten minute news cycle that just gets repeated over and over again. Between the morning TV news, the car radio and then evening news I lose count of how many times I hear the same reports. It almost feels like the networks are trying to brainwash the public through repetition.
Yes, I agree with him about the news filler. “And now we cut to a live interview of the sister of a man who lived next door to someone who knew the murderer in high school. Why do you think he did it?” It’s such a waste of time.
Followed by their pundit’s take on her views and a discussion of “experts” on how high school causes murder.
Lol, Lilacflowers. Exactly.
^This exactly! It’s why nowadays I only watch BBC news.
I Choose Me, I was blown away by the coverage of the Scotland vote. Actually showing ballots being counted and reporting tallies instead of listening to endless talking heads pontificate on one another’s blather.
I remember a mike Myers interview and he said he only had 2-3 hours sleep a night. How do people function..? Are there any readers that are the same..? Please share on this matter.
Ridiculously high life-long tolerance (try to take my coffee away from me and the police will never find your body)+being a night owl+funky sleep patterns(if I put my head down, I’m fairly sure I just go straight to REM).
Admittedly, I’m usually averaging 4-6 hrs sleep. 2-3 is for people far more productive than I 😉
@KALI, I would hate to ever get between you and your coffee. Lol
Yeah, no, there’s no way. The older I get the more sleep I seem to need, 8-9 hours a night, usually. When I was younger I’d sometimes pull all nighters for work and get less sleep and hated it — I would always be cold and want to overeat when I was sleep deprived. When I had kids I was forced to sleep less because of their newborn eating/sleeping habits and again I felt that weird ickiness, general lack of health. Sleep is clearly huge for me but I don’t think everyone’s the same.
It is for me, too. I feel terrible when I don’t get a good night’s sleep, and it takes me 2 full days to feel normal again. My mother has a really high metabolism, and she only needs about 4 hours of sleep every night. Not me, I take after my Dad, the napper.
4-5 hours for me. Attempts at more than that are futile. And I last took a nap at the age of four, under protest.
Same here.
I only sleep about 4 hours at night, too, but I nap during the day, so I end up getting about 6-7 hours of sleep in total.
Hemsworth and Evans has 6-picture Marvel contracts. Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier) is the one with the 9-picture deal.
That man’s feet are…enormous.
Who let Jeremy take the grumpy old guy pills? He sounds so angry.
Maybe it was just the excerpts you put in the post? Maybe I’m grumpy? Maybe I’m getting to much information too early?
I haven’t earned it.
I’m staying off his lawn.
Lol 👍👍👍
I like to think I am discerning and able to evaluate the validity of information, but maybe so much is thrown at us that it just seeps in. There was an interesting CIA file released about the Gary Webb (Kill the Messenger) case which suggested that certain sections of society are particularly susceptible to stories in the press. I took that to be very racist and it was rather shocking to see that sort of comment in an official document.
Which parent doesn’t have pictures of their baby playing with toys in the baths or running around in a paddling pool in the back garden?
Ones who are smart enough to know how the technology actually works
I can’t wait to see a Hawkeye movie with Black Widow, Renner and ScarJo truly have great chemistry!
So he thinks people should pay to get info, does he mean through higher education? Because financially that’s a very steep burden these days. What is wrong with being aware of the world and self-educating?
Sure, there’s a lot of sucky clickbait out there, but without the internet, we’d never have independent news outlets that operate on donations only and who are the last remaining vestige of genuine investigative journalism without *corporate or government control. Seek them out Jeremy. YOU might learn something.
*redundant nouns, anyway.
Should we sign him up for democracynow dot org & commondreams dot org, Kiddo? Nah, he hasn’t earned it.
Just got the sads thinking that the war over net neutrality might make those sites unavailable in the near future.
*cries and runs off into the deep web*
http://www.propublica.org/
as another example.
Excuse me for being a bit intense, but I am finding all this stuff fascinating since I started reading up on Gary Webb. Anyway, I have noticed that Renner is no intellectual, he is very bright, but what he says often come out a bit garbled. So to put it more into perspective, he was asked about Ferguson, Missouri. His response was that there was too much noise for him to come to a conclusion about what had happened. He said he would wait until all the information was available and only then would he be able to look at it and form an opinion. So I don’t think he really has a problem with information, just the amount of poor quality information and opinion that masquerades as fact.
I think Jeremy did a few years in a local junior college, but that is it. I get the impression there was him, his mum, his sister and two to young kids, so going away to school wasn’t an option.
Gary Webb is the hero of independent internet news outlets. He is credited as the first person to use the internet to present all his research and a more indepth story than could be covered in print. He co-founded a school to train independent journalists, most of whom work on line and he is credited with saving Narconews by helping them raise money when they came under legal attack. By championing Gary Webb and getting Kill the Messenger made I reckon they think Jeremy is a bit of a hero too. Give the guy a break, he is middle aged and a self proclaimed technophobe, it doesn’t mean he is without value.
Who said he was without value? I was responding to the content of his interview which, since HE put it out there, shouldn’t be a problem. I think this has less to do with being middle-aged and more to do with either not being able to articulate thoughts, or not being entirely educated on the value of the information age, in spite of the enormous drawbacks. Privacy loss is huge problem. Gaining information without having to ‘earn’ it is priceless.
Sorry kiddo. I actually agree with everything you just said.
My concern isn’t so much easy access to information, it’s how stupid people are in dealing with it. The internet is large enough that you can have your suspicions or ideas “confirmed” at the click of a button. No effort, no research. Lazy! That’s not just kids though, older adults are falling into that trap. Often what you don’t know is not as dangerous as what you think you know.
His contract is shorter because he signed it as an already Oscar nominated acclaimed actor. Hemsworth was nobody.
The rest of the interview is really good. This is a pretty good line:
“It’ll be cool to show your daughter these superhero movies when she grows up. “Dad is a superhero… you need to listen to Dad.”
[Laughs] When she’s a teenager I’ll say, “Watch The Town. This is your Dad. Behave.”
That should be enough to keep her in line — he’s pretty menacing in The Town!
Eh, my dad talks the same way and he’s the one who most cheers me on my studies. To me it sounds like he loves his daughter. People are unbelievably quick to judge someone based on small things they say.
I just have always liked this guy and when he shares his opinions I am fine with it. But he needs more sleep. How can anyone survive on that amount of sleep? I would be bear and a clumsy bear at that!
He looks like a mix of Tom Cruise & Salma Hayek’s husband.
Jeremy is a wonderful actor. Articulate speaker? No. Father and husband? Who knows. I hope he gets an Oscar sometime. Hope his movie does well – seems to have an interesting message to be determined. At least it’s not a sequel to Hansel and Gretel!
He is really turning into an asshole after he had made it big. After seeing how he was a dismissive ass at SDCC (which is part of his job) and all his recent interviews, can’t really like him anymore.