The mayor is ready to get back to work. Mayor of Kingstown returns to Paramount+ for its third season, with the first episode premiering Sunday, June 2. For lead actor Jeremy Renner, his return to the series is nothing short of a triumph after his recovery from a near-fatal snow plow accident … and his character will be going through some things, too.
Filming for Season 3 began about a year after Renner narrowly survived the accident and was hospitalized with dozens of broken bones. It took months for the actor to begin walking again, but by January of this year, he was back in action on set for his gritty streaming drama. Now, Season 3 is nearing its premiere, and Renner is revealing a bit about what fans can expect to see when the show returns.
Season 2’s finale left fans with not one but two potentially game-changing cliffhangers, with the shooting and hospitalization of Mike’s mother Mariam (Dianne Wiest) and the explosion of the villainous Milo’s (Aidan Gillen) yacht. While we’ll have to wait until Episode 1, “Soldier’s Heart,” hits Paramount+ to find out what’s become of both of them, what we do know is that there’ll be some new threats in town sooner than later, and at least one of them is going to drudge up ancient history that Mike has been burying for so long.
“We’ve talked about his backstory, that he had been incarcerated. It was always touched on,” Renner told TV Insider. “We’ll dig into it more this season. There’s a guy from his past that comes in.”
On the scale that’s so often cited by Mike and others of good and evil, Renner would rate Mike in the top “5% of good” category at the start of the season. However, he also notes that this mysterious criminal history of his means he’s very capable of being in that top “5% of evil,” too, so seeing an old acquaintance might bring it back out of him.
“That’s him shedding skin, being on the outside now and shedding all of that. Just because you had to do bad things or evil things doesn’t mean you are evil. You have to go in there to survive,” Renner explained of his character’s mindset. With the return of some ghosts of his past, Mike will be forced to consider his own place in the balance: “He’s kind of pondering that and questioning that and trying to move through that internally throughout this season,” Renner teased.
“There’s also another AB [Aryan Brotherhood] powerhouse that comes in from Mike’s past that kind of stirs up a whole lot of things,” the actor continued. “So with new drama, there’s new baddies, so it forces Mike to probably be that much better, or that much more evil, I don’t know. But it’s really exciting to watch, that’s for sure.”
Mayor of Kingstown, Season 3 premiere, June 2, Paramount+