Revisiting Jeremy Renner’s portrayal of Jeffrey Dahmer
Cinematic discussion has recently been engulfed by the life and crimes of American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, courtesy of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s hit Netflix series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Sitting at the top of the streaming service’s most-watched list for 21 days, Evan Peters delivered what is perhaps the performance of his career in the show, bringing the horrific crimes of Dahmer to life and making them more notorious than ever before.
Although this portrayal of Dahmer will likely go down as the definitive depiction, most people forget that 20 years ago, someone else played the role and did it with an equal amount of panache, Jeremy Renner.
Whilst people typically think of Renner as being purely a man for big-budget Hollywood films, with his role as Hawkeye in the Marvel Cinematic Universe his most famous, seconded by his appearances in titles such as The Bourne Legacy and the Mission Impossible series, there’s actually more to him than meets the eyes. Renner has delivered a host of brilliant roles over the years, including in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Hurt Locker, The Town, American Hustle and Wind River.
Although the aforementioned titles were successes in many different ways, and were helmed by some of the most revered auteurs out there, people often forget that Jeremy Renner’s ascent was a gradual one and that some of his earliest celebrated performances came by way of indie films such as 2004’s The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and 2005’s Neo Ned.
However, his breakthrough came in the form of Jeffrey Dahmer in 2002’s Dahmer, and it was the first real sign of the brilliance to come over Renner’s career. The performance is undoubtedly raw, but Renner brought something new to the role of Dahmer, adding an extra bit of Generation X spice with his edgy portrayal of the serial killer remarkably balanced for a relatively unknown prospect on the block. He’s utterly terrifying at points, but this is matched by self-awareness and the undercurrent that he is a product of his environment, as was the real man who terrorised America for so long.
Of the role, Renner explained the consonance underpinning his performance to NPR in 2010: “I had to approach that from a very sort of human thing. I couldn’t judge him by what he did. I had to understand again — what fuels a human being to go to these lengths, to do these things. Once I was getting into abandonment issues — once I was getting into abandonment issues and not having his father around, and being a young gay man at 14 who realises — yeah, so I had to come up with very human behaviour for what fuels this individual, and I needed reasons why.”
It’s not a perfect portrayal or film by any stretch of the imagination, but Dahmer was where it all really started for Jeremy Renner. This is so irrefutable that the director of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow, specifically cast Renner in the role of Sergeant First Class William James because “he has the right sort of innate bravado and hubris”.
It’s a strange movie, but 2002’s Dahmer is well worth your time.