His near death brought new life to his TV show
Jeremy Renner’s comeback from a near fatal accident made ‘Mayor of Kingstown’ more meaningful for co-creator Hugh Dillon
“This has been the most meaningful year of television in my life,” said Hugh Dillon over the phone.
The 60-year-old Canadian actor and musician, who’s appeared in everything from homegrown dramas “Flashpoint” and “Durham County” to U.S. hits “The Killing” and “Yellowstone,” was talking about making the third season of “Mayor of Kingstown,” which debuts Sunday.
The Paramount Plus drama that Dillon co-created with Taylor Sheridan is set in a fictional Michigan town where penitentiaries are the main industry. It stars Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner as the titular “mayor,” a fixer who leverages his relationships with police and criminals, prison guards and inmates, to try to maintain peace. (Think of it as a little bit of “Ray Donovan” mixed with “Oz,” “The Wire” and “We Own This City,” except the clients aren’t spoiled rich people.)
But relationships in “Kingstown” are just as important off the set as on, which is why Dillon found making Season 3, in particular shooting with Renner, such a profound experience.
Renner nearly died a year before filming on this season began when he was run over by a six-tonne snowplow on New Year’s Day 2023. The accident broke 38 bones, collapsed one of his lungs and put him on life support for several days. The 53-year-old now has titanium rods and plates in his left leg, his rib cage and his face, and told People magazine he’ll be in recovery for the rest of his life.
“I had to ask his mom, basically, for permission for him to do (the show) this year,” said Dillon. “He was still sort of in a wheelchair and his mom’s like, ‘Don’t f-k this up.’ And I’m like, ‘We won’t.’ ”
“My mom’s got this resting face that just looks murderous and he’s, like, terrified of my mom,” Renner said in a separate interview.
All jokes aside, Renner’s mother, Valerie Cearley, had good reason to be cautious. Yet Renner not only made it back to the set in Pittsburgh this past January, he was able to reclaim the “purpose swagger” that is a hallmark of his character, Mike McLuskey — even while walking on ice in dress shoes.
Renner wasn’t certain he’d be able to walk without a limp when he started filming. He had a hard time just conceiving of acting again, he said.
“I said yes and let’s do the season and I feel ready, and then I thought, wow, I got to go do fiction. And how much does this really mean to me when all my focus for that year was on my health and well-being? …
“It was a very emotional first month to get back on my feet, get back into that character. There’s a fight sequence in the first episode. It’s not a big one, but enough to like (wonder) ‘Can my body do these things again?’ ” Renner added.
“We were all cheering and crying at the end of this thing, like, ‘Oh, wow, look what just happened.’ I didn’t think I could do it, but I did it, right? And it’s pretty awesome.”
Renner’s transformation “was extraordinary,” Dillon said. “But it has nothing to do with acting. (It’s him) as a human being, that transition.”
‘I was trying to save my own life’
Beyond Renner’s remarkable comeback, “Mayor of Kingstown” has always been special to Dillon. He said he first conceived of it as a 17-year-old living in Kingston, Ont., where the city’s jails seemed omnipresent. (There were six penitentiaries in the area as of 2018, according to Queen’s University. Its most famous, the 19th-century Kingston Penitentiary, closed in 2013 and was used as a location for the first season of the show, which also shot in Brantford, Hamilton and Toronto.)
Dillon had friends whose parents were prison guards and his mother, a teacher, taught female inmates. He remembers being in a car with his parents when he was six and seeing the guard towers of Kingston Penitentiary. “I thought it was Disneyland,” he said. Later, notorious serial killer Clifford Olson was incarcerated at Kingston Pen and Dillon was struck by the thought that
“he now lives a mile from you.”
“You’re trying to absorb all of these different aspects of humanity and crime and punishment. … It left a distinct impression on me,” he said.
What Dillon initially thought might be a movie about Kingston’s prison culture took shape as a TV series after he met Taylor Sheridan some 20 years ago. Sheridan, not yet the screenwriter and director of “Sicario,” “Hell or High Water” and “Yellowstone” fame, coached Dillon through his auditions after the latter moved to L.A. to pursue acting.
“I (was) trying to save my own life, basically, and clean up,” said Dillon, referring to his struggles with drugs and alcohol.
He and Sheridan became friends through three seasons of “Durham County” and 75 episodes of “Flashpoint,” and conversations about rock ’n’ roll — Dillon is also the lead singer of the punk rock band the Headstones.
One of those conversations turned to “the concept of ‘Kingstown’ … it just starts off as many of these things do, as a conversation between people who are passionate about the subject, whether it’s rock ’n’ roll, film and television, or science or whatever it may be,” Dillon said.
But passion didn’t start to turn into reality until after Sheridan gained cred with the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated Denis Villeneuve film “Sicario”; “Kingstown” didn’t debut until 2021, three years after Sheridan’s popular western “Yellowstone” (in which Dillon had a role as Sheriff Donnie Haskell) began.
‘He’s been like my right arm’
It was another Sheridan project that brought Renner into Dillon’s life, the 2017 movie “Wind River.”
“But our friendship grew a lot more working on putting this show together and even more so, like (it) did with all my friendships, from the accident,” Renner said.
Dillon, Renner added, has been “a great champion … (he’s) always protected me in whatever I needed or was requiring throughout this process. He’s been like my right arm in this.”
The bond between the characters of Mike and Ian Ferguson, the narcotics, robbery and homicide detective that Dillon plays, also grows this season. There’s “more intimacy, a lot more backstory because they’ve been friends since they were kids,” Renner said, “and I love that.”
“Some of our real relationship bleeds into the characters,” added Dillon.
That’s not the only way art imitates life for Dillon. Some of the characters in “Kingstown” are inspired by people he knew in Kingston, including Mike and Ian, who’s named after a friend who died in 2017.
“So this isn’t just some name that we slapped on characters … it’s just a very meaningful show in every respect for me,” Dillon said.
He was speaking the day after the New York City premiere of the show’s new season, during which he was quickly struck by how happy Renner seemed.
“Our world (in the series) is so dark, but there’s humour in it and it’s just so creative … but underneath it is this dude who’s just positive and you can’t escape it,” said Dillon. “That’s why it just improves the quality of everyone’s existence.”