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In the movie The Town, Jeremy Renner said that he and the primary cast were pretty much working with a bunch of former criminals. Yikes!

Apparently to make the movie more believable and add some extra tension to filming, director Ben Affleck cast ex-convicts in the movie, but didn’t tell anybody who they were.

“There’s the main cast, then everyone else in it was a bank robber, or currently a bank robber,” Renner told Total Film magazine.

To maximize their accents and performances, Jeremy revealed that he and Ben hung out around prisons too.

“When it came to the accent and things like that we didn’t want to sound like a real polished kind of thing – we just hung around people, criminals, prison-to kind of get a sense of it, you know?” Jeremy explained. “We were all pretty adamant about keeping the movie as authentic as we could.”

Thankfully I like him much more as a cleaned up actor – as seen above at the Venice Film Festival – than as a crook.