Kelowna Rory Milliken (left) and Jeremy Renner co-host Rennervations.

Image Credit: Submitted/Rory Milliken

Jeremy Renner may be a huge movie star but, aided by his Kelowna buddy Rory Milliken, he’s turning his passion for buying big trucks and buses into huge bonuses for organizations working with children in need.

The two men co-hosted the recently completed Disney Plus four-part show Rennervations that converted recycled vehicles into things like a dance studio, water filtration plant and recording studio.

“The guy’s so famous and so successful, the last thing he needs, like a hole in the head, is a TV show,” Milliken told iNFOnews.ca. “But he did it because it was for kids.”

Renner is known for starring roles in Avengers, Mission Impossible and Bourne Legacy movies, is commonly known as Hawkeye and as the star of the Mayor of Kingstown TV series.

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What he’s not as well known for is supporting lots of good causes, especially when children are benefitting, Milliken said.

During COVID, Renner got a little bored so he went out and bought a decommissioned fire truck.

“We were scrambling over this like kids climbing on a fire truck in a firehall during a school field trip,” Milliken, who hangs out at Renner’s homes a lot, said. “It was exciting and I thought that was the extent of it. He bought an old fire truck and our kids were going to have a blast and it made a lot of sense.

“Then, another one showed up and another one and another one and city buses and Humvees and shuttle buses from movie lots. I just sat there going: ‘What the hell are you going to do with this stuff?’”

Milliken is a Kelowna-based inventor and entrepreneur who is launching a massive mushroom factory in Coldstream.

He told Autoblog that he met Renner about 15 years ago when he was playing pool with members of Nickelback.

“I’d never heard of Jeremy Renner – no clue who this guy was,” the article quotes Milliken as saying.

“We were talking about this movie, ‘Arrival,’ and he was intimating he was in it. I was like, ‘Yeah, I just saw it. Superman’s girlfriend was in it, but I don’t remember you.’ He goes, ‘Look, I was the co-star.” I stared at him, said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think so.’

“So we kinda just sort of hit it off that way. He said: ‘Give me your number and either I’m gonna delete it and block it forever or you and I are going to become good buddies.”

The good buddies vibe won out and now they spend a lot of time together, which included talking about this collection of about 250 very large vehicles Renner not only amassed but had to buy acres of land to store them on.

Some of Jeremy Renters many buses and trucks.

Image Credit: YouTube/Disney Plus

Renner said he was going to make businesses out of them but Milliken, who knows how long it takes to start up a business, had another idea.

“I made a joke and said we should make a TV show out of this,” Milliken said. “He got all excited. I was joking. He goes: ‘It’s a great idea. You and I are going to host it together.’”

So Rennervations was born.

But this isn’t just some reality show about using a lot of power tools and building things.

“He said there’s a much bigger play here,” Milliken said. “’We can start focusing on organizations around the world and converting these vehicles into useful products they can use and can continue to use.’”

That was one key element of the project.

“You couldn’t just drop these off for the sake of a show and walk away and the thing rusts in the field or, in the worst case scenario, the thing becomes a burden and an expense for insurance and upkeep,” Milliken said.

In order to make these legacy projects it was essential, first of all, to listen to what the organizations really needed then design something to fit their needs.

The second key element was to make sure the show was not about Jeremy Renner.

“If it was a ‘look how awesome I am show as a celebrity,’ he told everybody, even if they were halfway through production and it started to lean that way, he was going to quit,” Milliken said. “That was an absolute dead stop. I was very proud of him for that. I know a lot of celebrities and very few would have done that.”

On the flip side of things, Renner fans are going to see a whole different side to him.

“You will see more of Jeremy Renner than anyone’s ever known,” Milliken said. “You see him in Hawkeye and Jason Bourne and Hurt Locker and all that stuff but that’s not who the dude is, not even close. He’s quite the opposite. He’s very quiet. He’s very private.”

A big complicating factor was a very tight timeline.

“We were under such a tight time gun because Jeremy has this side hustle called the Avengers and the Mayor of Kingstown,” Milliken said. “He’s got a full-time acting job so we had a really, really narrow window to do this.”

That window was about six weeks. Three projects were built in a huge warehouse in Reno that was outfitted with tools and equipment normally used to build creations for the annual Burning Man festival.

The fourth was done in India with a different build crew.

While the North American vehicles went to organizations helping kids, the Indian one was of a slightly different nature.

This is a mobil water filtration plant in India.

Image Credit: YouTube/Disney Plus

“We heard about the horrible problem of saline water,” Milliken said. “The water in India is full of salt and chemicals. It’s totally undrinkable. This is a bit different than what we were doing with the other three but this is life-giving water. It doesn’t get bigger than this.”

Schools in the Rajasthan area in India had to truck expensive water in from a safe well far away.

By building a mobile water filtration truck, they were able to provide much cheaper clean water for half a dozen schools.

“The money they can save by being able to filter their own water can go to more important programs, things like books and chalkboards and things they’re really lacking there,” Milliken said. “What’s cool about this is, if we can do this, we can work with a charity and build a fleet of these that can travel all over India to different schools and housing developments and complexes.”

Doing a separate build was an extra challenge because, in Reno, the one build team could work on all three projects at once and work around the clock, often sleeping on couches.

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Part-way through, as he got to know them better, Milliken figured out why so many really busy, really skilled people all converged on the site to dedicate countless hours to the project.

A number of them, including head builder Rob “Bender” Park, had grown up in foster homes and knew first-hand how tough life can be for some children.

“Every superhero has an origin story,” Milliken said. “One of the big super heroes of this show is the build crew and their origin stories related to these various organizations we were dealing with and we had no idea.”

Bender was drawn particularly to the dance studio created for Casa Hogar in Cabo San Lucas.

“Dance is a big part of Mexican culture and they had a dance school,” Milliken said “A hurricane blew the roof off it and they didn’t have the money to replace it,”

Casa Hogar is an organization with a mission to provide “home and care” for vulnerable children between four and 18 years old and is totally dependent on private donations.

This dance studio went to Mexico.

Image Credit: YouTube/Disney Plus

“So, we built a dance studio out of a city bus,” Milliken said. “It has a massive automated dance floor that folds down with huge lighting on automatic light rails so it looks like a concert with speakers and spinning lights and DJ booth. It’s amazing. It’s a full-blown dance studio on a city bus. It folds up into the bus with a motor and cables and you just drive down the road.”

By being mobile, it can travel to different fundraising events and contribute financially to Casa Hogar as well.

They found that The Base, in Chicago, had different needs.

“It’s run by a former fireman and former police officer,” Milliken said. “They created it to get kids off the street because the gangs are so prevalent in Chicago. They rent out a former school. The school has sports and counselling and baseball and batting cages and basketball.

“So we interviewed them and said: ‘What’s big?’ Well, music is huge and rap is huge and song is huge but they don’t have much for that so we thought, how cool would it be to create a mobile recording studio that they could go and have contests and drive it around and recruit people through public fundraisers and have people come in and lay down tracks and rehearse in the bus.”

Mobile recording studio in Chicago.

Image Credit: YouTube/Disney Plus

That was particularly challenging because part of the bus is a rehearsal studio but there’s also a segregated, soundproof, professional quality recording studio. That meant no humming diesel generators so the bus was converted with a massive string of car batteries to power it and the equipment.

Closer to home, the Reno Big Brothers Big Sisters club found that lower income people with children in need were forced to live far out of the downtown area where the potential big brothers and sisters lived.

“We created a mobile meeting centre where you could grab the bigs to travel to the outskirts to meet the littles,” Milliken said. “And you convert that meeting centre inside this big shuttle bus into a mobile sports shuttle.”

While there’s a 3-D printer, computer stations and meeting spaces inside, the bus comes with a full sized soccer net and a basketball hoop that fold down on the outside.

“It gave them something a little fun to do athletically while meeting inside, getting to know each other,” Milliken said.

A mobile meeting room/sports centre for Reno.

Image Credit: YouTube/Disney Plus

While the dance studio was the toughest project to pull off, it’s not like any of them were easy.

“There’s no YouTube video on it,” Milliken said. “No one’s ever done it. These were complex builds done by some of the best builders in the United States and they were stumped.”

But, pull it off they did.

“It was amazing we got four of them,” Milliken said. “We were sure at least one of them wasn’t going to work. If we failed, we were going to be honest about it and show we failed, saying: ‘This is how far we got. It’s incredibly disappointing. We’ll come back next year and try to figure this out.’”

Instead, they will come back next year with a whole new season.

“If you can work with organizations, put smiles on kids’ faces and make people happy and motivate other people to pay that forward to make more people happy on a global scale because of that show, wow,” Milliken said. “What a blessing that my best friend happens to be a global movie star and he has a heart of gold and he trusted me to do this with him so that I get to participate in this and I get to make a difference where, normally I would never have been able to make a difference like this on a global scale.”

The show has the capability of reaching hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Because Jeremy Renner stars in Rennervations, it has the potential to draw parents and kids together to learn that they, too, can help in their own communities.

“Really, the message of the show is to inspire, educate and motivate people to get involved and to look around them and do something in their communities,” Milliken said. “That’s the secret agenda of the show.”

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