“BREATHE.”
She says this to the man as he bench-presses what feels like a Buick, his face scrunched, spittle flying through his pursed lips, his biceps and pectorals bulging. When she lets loose that single word—Breathe—he forces out a thundering exhale, then sucks back in, inhaling all the air in the neighborhood. She knows when to tell him to breathe. She knows how important it is for him, and when she says “Breathe” she doesn’t scream it at him like a football coach. She says it just loud enough for him to hear over his grunts, and over Dua Lipa on the Bluetooth. (His daughter’s playlist, always.) A command, but gentle.
She runs a gym in town, Amp Fitness, but comes here to the four-car garage of his rented McMansion to train him four days a week, sometimes five. And the garage is triiiiicked out. Power Plate Rev bike and Move vibration platform, full rack of Hampton free weights, hyperbaric oxygen chamber, two Weider adjustable dumbbells, something called a glute-ham developer, and various other machines, bands, straps, weights, and balls.
All for him.
And Cat? The one telling him to breathe? She’s the most important part of this makeshift gym. A sprite in black spandex, five and a half feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds with the ponytail, could kick your ass. She knows what happened to his body. He’s been here in this house in Sewickley, where the Pittsburgh money lives, for almost five months. He arrived in early January, one year after the accident, and Cat Cantella has been here almost every day with him, whenever he can fit training in his shooting schedule.
The man being told to breathe is Jeremy Renner, and he’s here doing season 3 of his white-knuckle show about a good man running a mean town and the hope and failure and compromise and faith and fear that fuel his daily survival. Renner is the whole show, in almost every scene of every episode, and he needs energy, he needs strength, he needs his hips and ankles and elbows to move the way they should. He’s always had a charming, herky-jerky way about him that makes him irresistible to watch: He cocks his head, tugs at his lapels, swaggers in
