MAN IN MOTION
IT’S AN EARLY-OCTOBER DAY, and as Jeremy Renner sits in the open-air lobby bar of Los Angeles’s Sunset Tower Hotel, the breeze smells faintly of smoke. Wildfires are raging in California and across the West, and the Caldor Fire, which crossed over the Sierras near Renner’s sprawling Nevada ranch above Lake Tahoe, is still not fully contained. Although his retreat was spared, it’s at risk each wildfire season. “There’s been a fire not a half mile from where my house is. Pretty threatening,” says Renner, who has trained as a volunteer firefighter. “I’m using fire trucks for defensible space and for protecting my neighborhood, all the people up there.”
Unlike the rest of us, he didn’t spend the pandemic bingeing on Netflix and death-scrolling Instagram. He spent nights bidding on fire trucks in online auctions, and he’s amassed quite a few. “I had 30 fire trucks a hundred feet from a hydrant,” he says. “Not because they’re there to firefight, but they all potentially could.” That Renner collects fire trucks rather than muscle cars or McLarens should not come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the 50-year-old actor’s career. They are, like him, highly pragmatic, more appreciated than loved, and easily overlooked until one is needed.
Renner’s fire trucks also find surprising ways to be useful. They put out fires, of course, but he also retrofitted one of his hook-and-ladders for a different purpose: a birthday-partymobile for kids, topped with a bounce house. “A compressor inside the fire truck, it blows up the thing,” Renner says excitedly. “On the side of the rig, Slurpee and snow-cone machines—all that stuff!”
His truck-rehabilitation project—which has grown to around 200 vehicles, each finding new life at his Nevada homestead—speaks to pragmatism and creativity. “It isn’t a horse ranch,” he says. “It’s more of a horsepower ranch.” Beyond fire engines, Renner is restoring and reimagining utility vans; an ambulance, which he is converting into a veterinary clinic; and a slew of city buses, which he has earmarked to become tiny homes and glamping accommodations. If they are still roadworthy, they might become roving barbershops or mobile gyms. Nothing is disposable or superfluous; nothing is static. “I try to do things with a flow,” he says, “and never square peg/round hole something. Why force it? Water flows over a
