Jeremy Renner (The Town) The Town
Jeremy Renner's performance as James "Jem" Coughlin earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and is widely regarded as the film's most electric element. Jem is Doug MacRay's best friend, surrogate brother, and the crew's enforcer -- a man who went to prison at nineteen for a murder committed to protect Doug and came out harder, angrier, and incapable of imagining life outside the code. Renner plays him as a man whose loyalty is indistinguishable from violence.
Affleck wanted someone who would make audiences nervous
The casting of Jem required an actor who could make volatility feel unpredictable rather than performed. Affleck had seen Renner in Dahmer (2002) and recognized the quality he needed.
"I wanted a guy who was really unpredictable and scary and you felt nervous when they were on screen." — Ben Affleck, The Ringer (2020)
Jon Hamm confirmed the unsettling effect Renner had on the production:
"I had also seen Dahmer. And I was like, 'Who the hell is this guy? He's crazy.'" — Jon Hamm, The Ringer (2020)
Renner prepared by drinking with convicted bank robbers
Rather than use dialect coaches, Affleck introduced Renner to former inmates -- armed robbers and bank robbers from the Charlestown area. Renner spent several weeks socializing with them in bars, absorbing their mannerisms, speech patterns, and psychology.
"I went to some prisons and had a few beers with ex-cons... Once I got to know them a little bit, I asked, 'Don't you ever get nervous?'" — Jeremy Renner, CinemaBlend (2020)
The research informed the physical specificity of the performance. Jem's restless energy, his reflexive aggression, his inability to sit still in any room -- these are behaviors Renner observed in men who had spent years in prison and never fully readjusted to civilian life.
The cemetery scene is Renner's structural pivot
The scene in which Jem walks Doug to the spot where he killed Brendan Leahey (beat 30) functions as the performance's emotional center. Jem narrates the murder with the flat affect of a man who has told the story to himself a thousand times, then delivers the line that crystallizes the entire friendship: "Yeah, well, you didn't have to, Dougy."
Titus Welliver, who plays Detective Ciampa, identified the scene as Renner's defining moment:
"He turned that scene into a scene about heartbreak and devastation... Renner's Oscar moment." — Titus Welliver, The Ringer (2020)
The scene works because Renner plays Jem's love for Doug as genuine and his menace as its byproduct. Jem is not threatening Doug -- he is showing him the weight of the debt, and the showing is more devastating than any threat.
Rebecca Hall described sharing scenes with him as frightening
The restaurant scene (beat 19), where Jem sits down uninvited at Doug and Claire's table, required Hall to play ignorance of the danger while Renner radiated it.
"Jeremy Renner's character was just so brilliant and frightening... all of those things at once." — Rebecca Hall, The Ringer (2020)
Jem's death is the performance's structural endpoint
In the Fenway Park climax (beat 39), Jem tells Doug "See you in Florida, kid," walks into the open, pretends to surrender, then raises his weapon and forces the FBI to kill him. The fifty-pound-mule speech from beat 35 -- "I can't do any more time, Dougy" -- makes the death feel less like heroics and more like a man executing his own predetermined ending. Renner plays the final moments without bravado, as a man who always knew how the story ended and is relieved to have reached it.
The Oscar nomination was Renner's second consecutive -- he had been nominated for Best Actor for The Hurt Locker (2009) the previous year. The back-to-back nominations established him as one of the most compelling actors of his generation, a status the subsequent Avengers franchise would make commercially legible but never artistically surpass.