Jeremy Renner Says He Doesn’t Have “Energy” To Play “Challenging” Roles After Snow Plow Accident: “I Can’t Just Go Play Make-Believe Right Now”

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Following the snowplow accident, Jeremy Renner says that he doesn’t “have the energy” for ” challenging ” roles amid his continued recovery.

Renner suffered from blunt chest trauma in January 2023 after an accident with a snow plow that ran him over.

“I just don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the fuel,” Renner said on the Smartless podcast, hosted by Will Arnett, Sean Hayes, and Jason Bateman. “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.”

The Mayor of Kingstown star returned to acting to start filming Season 3 and acknowledged that he was “very terrified,” adding, “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. It was a big stretch. It was very, very challenging for me mentally to get over that hump.”

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

Renner is set to join Daniel Craig in the next installment of the Knives Out saga. The actor was recently cast in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery where he will also join Kerry Washington, Josh O’Connor, Cailee Spaeny, Glenn Close and Andrew Scott.