One of the real pleasures of the last few months has been the comeback of Jeremy Renner. Last year, we very nearly lost him as he dealt with near-fatal injuries. And now he’s back and already returned to his series, Mayor of Kingstown, and signing on to new films including Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. But he’s also spoken about being open to more Mission: Impossible, which is interesting since he vanished from the franchise after two appearances. In a comprehensive interview on the Happy.Sad.Confused podcast, Renner talked about the difficulty in returning to M:I, and the reason why he left in the first place. Scheduling is only part of the reason…
“The way [those movies] are filmed is that there’s these giant set pieces, and they start to write the film around these set pieces. Tom will be working on this stunt for a long time, and they’ll build a story around these set pieces, so there’s no schedule, so I can’t go out for a year and a half; I gotta go be a dad… So I was landlocked out here; I couldn’t film overseas anymore.”
“If I were single, I’d probably still be doing those films,” he added. “Maybe when my daughter is older, maybe there’s more of an opportunity to do something.”
Renner appeared as William Brandt in both Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol and Mission: Impossible-Rogue Nation, but was unable to come back for the sequel, Mission; Impossible-Fallout. And at the time, it was mostly attributed to him being busy playing Hawkeye in Marvel’s Avengers movies, but Renner offers up another reason he was reluctant to return…
“They also—I remember they tried to bring me over[seas] for a week so they could kill my character, and I was like, ‘No, you don’t get to do that. You’re not going to drag me over there and just kill my character,’ like get out of here!” If you’re going to do this and you’re going to use my character, you’re going to do it right,” he laughed.
“I yelled at Chris [director Christopher McQuarrie]. Dude, you’re not going to do this to me like that; you’re not going to do me wrong”, Renner laughed again.
Renner also brushed off the idea that he was ever going to replace Tom Cruise, an idea now that seems ludicrous considering the heights Mission: Impossible has achieved, both literally and figuratively. Whether Renner does enlist in another ‘mission’, we’ll just have to wait and see. Nobody ever stays gone from these movies for long, so if Renner’s personal complications can get resolved it could very well happen.
