Jeremy Renner Says He Can’t Take Any ‘Challenging’ Roles Amid Continued Recovery

Jeremy Renner is reevaluating the kinds of roles he can take on after surviving a January 2023 snow-plow accident.

Renner revealed during the “Smartless” podcast that he was at first “terrified” to return to acting after the near-fatal crash. But he was back on set to film Season 3 of series “Mayor of Kingstown” just one year after first being hospitalized.

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The MCU alum said he was “very terrified” to be back onscreen “because I’m to do, like, fucking fiction? I’m still trying to live in reality, I’m trying to live. So it was a hard line for me to cross.”

He continued, “It was a big stretch. It was very, very challenging for me mentally to get over that hump.”

Thankfully, Renner’s “Mayor of Kingstown” isn’t as demanding as say, portraying Jeffrey Dahmer, according to the actor.

“I still struggle with it sometimes to, like, I don’t take it super seriously,” Renner said. “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.”

In fact, Renner is steering clear of any of the more “challenging” projects and is instead opting for what’s best for his own recovery. That includes appearing in Rian Johnson’s third “Knives Out” whodunit installment, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.”

“I just don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the fuel,” Renner said of more intense 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.”

This certainly isn’t the first time Renner has turned down roles — he was in a position to do so before the accident as well.

Renner recently said that he turned down appearing in “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” after realizing his character was going to be killed off — he even told director Christopher McQuarrie that the planned demise of his character would be the “wrong” decision. Renner added to Collider that he would be open to returning to the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, so long as his character lives.

“I love those guys. I love Tom [Cruise] so much,” Renner said. “We had so much fun, and I love that character a lot. […] I’d always jump into a ‘Mission: Impossible’ anytime and back into [my character] Brandt. It’s great.”

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