‘Hawkeye’ Director Rhys Thomas on Jeremy Renner’s ‘Genius’ Performance and if He’d Work With Marvel Again: ‘Good Question’

“Saturday Night Live” alum director Rhys Thomas was “as surprised as anybody” when he got the call to possibly work with Marvel on what would eventually become “Hawkeye.” Speaking at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the filmmaker joked of his first reaction: “Hey, look, we are all whores, right?”

“You get an opportunity for a bigger budget and it’s Marvel,” he added. “What interested me in that show was that fans were not interested in Hawkeye because he doesn’t have any superpowers. He’s a real guy. The comic book they highlighted for me as a tonal reference was by Matt Fraction, and that was grounded in that kind of energy that this is a real guy who was in pain and [who was] beaten up. He made mistakes. It was really the story of an ordinary guy with a poor sense of self-worth.”

Thomas said the show didn’t “feel like Marvel” to him, and recalled having the first meeting with the team right before the pandemic. “There were no time constraints, so I got to look at [the outlines] and send my thoughts and some ideas. It was about three or four months in the early pandemic that I was pitching the show to Kevin Feige and the team and then, of course, it being Marvel, I came on board and they completely threw everything out they had before and we started writing the show again.”

On this, Thomas said he read James Gunn state, “You never go into production without a script at DC Studios,” but that is not how he did things with “Hawkeye.” The director praised Jeremy Renner and Hailey Steinfeld, emphasizing how important it is to have the flexibility to adapt scripts to actors in major projects such as his Marvel series. Thomas recalled how Renner would often encompass pages of dialogue with a grunt, calling the actor “a genius” in his embodiment of the character. 

“Jeremy frequently didn’t want say much, you know,” he went on. “His character in the script had all this exposition. We had him saying a lot. He was genius [in] that kind of knowing, ‘I can, I can say that entire paragraph just like this [grunts].’ And he could. Not many people can.”

The “SNL” veteran said he had a “good relationship” with the production team and Feige, and felt the “fluidity” he had at the time was interesting, despite recognizing he worked with Marvel early in their TV era, while they were still trying to understand the production structure for the small screen. When asked whether he would work with Marvel again, Thomas said it was a “good question.”

“It’s insane,” he exhaled, praising the scale he got to work with during “Hawkeye,” especially when it came to casting and “the lists of actors who would pick up the phone.” “We built Rockefeller Center in Atlanta. We built the ice rink and the ground for the entire plaza in Atlanta. There are not many places you get to do that. That side of it, of course.”

The director wrapped his thoughts on his time at Marvel by saying he “definitely came out of it longing for another season” of his long-running mockumentary show “Documentary Now!” The series, co-created and co-produced with his “SNL” fellows Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, was presented by Helen Mirren and ran for four seasons between 2015-2022. 

On lining up the prestigious Oscar-winner for his comedy show, Thomas said his desire was to have someone flicking through channels, stumbling upon the show and believing it was a “real documentary,” so they would need someone with “some authority” to be a part of it and grant it that level of authenticity. “We kept saying Helen Mirren as an example and some day we realized: Why don’t we just ask Helen Mirren? And, weirdly, she said yes.”

“I don’t think she realized she was committing to four seasons’ worth of hosting duties, but she’s great,” he added.

Elsewhere in the conversation, the director spoke about working with A24 on Romanian Cold War parody “Comrade Detective,” praising the “total freedom” he had with the indie company, and recalled moving to New York from the U.K. “on a whim” to pursue his filmmaking career. Thomas quickly landed on “Saturday Night Live,” where he stayed for 12 years between 2005 and 2017. “I knew what ‘SNL’ was as an institution growing up, but back then you couldn’t see it in the U.K.,” he recalled. “The second ‘SNL’ I ever saw was my first week working there, and I honestly didn’t get it. It didn’t live up to the expectations.”

“It’s a live show, it’s topical, it moves quickly,” he continued. “It took me a while to understand that context and figure it out. Eight years in, when I finally started directing it, I finally had a sense of it. I also felt I could bring a different sensibility when I had the opportunity to do things, and knew at that point I was not as funny as anyone in front of the camera. My job was to take it as seriously as possible.”

Currently, Thomas is in development on “a few film projects,” hoping to direct his sophomore feature a decade after helming the Colin Jost-penned comedy “Staten Island Summer,” but reiterated that “nothing is real until you’re actually making it.”

“At the same time, with television, what you learn quickly is that you’ve got to keep making your own path, especially if you want to be tonally specific or if your taste is something you’re not seeing. I developed relationships with different writers and showrunners that I’ve worked with over the years, and we sort of continue to develop things together. The idea of starting with a blank page terrifies the hell out of me,” he joked. “But I’m very good at giving notes.”