Jeremy Renner Looks Like a Portobello Mushroom: An Oral History
Latest

Our memories are notoriously flawed, rendering even the most unforgettable events into a melange of gaps, manipulations, and, frankly, shit that never even happened. But we often fancy ourselves immune from misremembering those moments we share over and over again, our enthusiasm for these tales spurring our certainty. It’s why I’m humbled to discover that one of my favorite stories to tell—the time a Tumblr anon got mad at me years ago for saying actor-turned-deadbeat–dad-turned-bad–musician-turned-bad–app–creator-turned-violent–asshole Jeremy Renner looked like a portobello mushroom—isn’t entirely accurate.
When I brought up this story in Slack, I was implored to blog about it sometime, most recently by Jezebel editor-in-chief Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, who warned, “i am NOT going to let u not do this blog.” So today, I got to work, looking through my old emails and largely dormant Tumblr account in search of the exact time the Renner Incident occurred. But what I found was something a little different, but equally stupid and fungus-related.
September 3, 2012
I made a post on Tumblr saying, “wait wut did this jeremy guy do?” I used the following tag: “all i know about him is that he’s rly unattractive.”
Apparently Renner was making the rounds on my Tumblr dashboard thanks to someone digging up some old receipts of him using the n-word in an interview, clumsily defending a neo-nazi character he portrayed in a movie role, and using transphobic slurs. Awful stuff that has nothing to do with how he looks.
I was 21 and deeply immature for calling Renner unattractive. Do I stand by it? Yes, because I’m a cunt. But let’s move on.
Approximately 15 minutes later, I received a direct message that read, “You think that the guy’s unattractive? Look in the mirror.”