The word “miracle” gets thrown around a lot. But it truly is miraculous to see the recovery of Jeremy Renner after being literally crushed by a snow plow just a year-and-a-half ago. Not only did he survive, but it seems as if he’s actually thriving—returning to work on “Mayor of Kingstown” Season 3 and an upcoming role in Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.” However, according to Renner, there are some limits to his capabilities right now.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Smartless podcast, Jeremy Renner talked about his accident and rehabilitation, but he also talked quite a bit about where he is now and how much he’s actually capable of doing. That is to say, it’s still a miracle he survived, but we shouldn’t necessarily expect him to be 100% right at this time.
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Specifically, Renner talked about his inability, as of now, to take on super heavy, challenging roles that require him to inhabit a character that is so against his type.
“I just don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the fuel,” Renner said about challenging roles. “I have so much fuel to put into this reality, this body, all this stuff. I can’t just go play make-believe right now. Because that takes a lot of time to get right here every day just so I can have a positive thought, so I can progress, so I can always keep growing.”
That’s why he was able to jump right back into ‘Kingstown.’ That’s a character he’s lived with for so long, it was almost second nature.
“I still struggle with it sometimes to, like, I don’t take it super seriously,” he said. “[In ‘Kingstown,’] I’m in a character that I can do very well and I know the show very well, so it was easy for me to kind of slide back into it. But if it was a very challenging role, I couldn’t have taken it. Not challenging in the sense that — because the show’s challenging, but it’s if I had to go play Dahmer or something, something so far from me.”
A role that people are really excited to see him potentially return to is Hawkeye in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While we don’t know when we might see Renner’s character return, the actor did talk about his concerns, initially, about taking on the role.
“My whole decade’s booked,” Renner said of his worries about taking on the Marvel role. “I’m going to be 50 years old in fucking tights.”
He added, “You’re an idiot to say no to these things. I knew I was going to miss a lot, but I knew there was an end to it.”
If there’s an end to it, it doesn’t feel like it’s now, as Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, is still very much a fan-favorite.
You can hear his full interview below: