"I can't just go play make-believe right now," said the "Mayor of Kingstown" actor.
Jeremy Renner is finally back in action after last year's near-fatal snow plow accident -- but for the time being, he's taking things slow.
The actor, 53, is dipping his toes back into the pool of performing with season 3 of his crime series, Mayor of Kingstown. As for what comes next, Renner recently admitted that he isn't yet ready to delve into any particularly "challenging" roles.
"I just don't have the energy for it. I don't have the fuel," Renner confessed during his June 24 appearance on the Smartless podcast. "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."
He continued, "It 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."
On January 1, 2023, Renner was crushed by his snowplow while trying to divert the vehicle from his nephew on his property in Nevada. The MCU actor was airlifted to a hospital after the accident, where they discovered he had suffered blunt chest trauma and orthopedic injuries. He was discharged after two weeks and revealed on social media that he broke more than 30 bones and was suffering a collapsed lung.
A year later -- after plenty of physical therapy and a long recovery cycle -- Renner was much improved and back to work on Mayor of Kingstown. But even returning to the familiar set of the series, created by Taylor Sheridan and Hugh Dillon, was no easy feat. Renner told podcast hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes that he was "very terrified" to be back in front of the camera.
"Because I'm to do, like, f---ing 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 said. "It was a big stretch. It was very, very challenging for me mentally to get over that hump."
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Though he managed to persevere and reprise his role as criminal mediator Mike McLusky, Renner said, "I still struggle with it sometimes. 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."
He noted that if he had returned to a "very challenging role," he "couldn't have taken it." He then clarified that while Mayor of Kingstown "is challenging," it thankfully didn't require him to "go play Dahmer or something so far from me."
The Paramount+ series stars Renner as the de-facto mayor of Kingstown, whose family of power brokers works to curb corruption and inequality in their Michigan town. Outside of the crime drama, Renner is next set to star in Rian Johnson's whodunit Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the latest in a series of movies about detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). The star-studded cast also includes Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Josh O'Connor and Cailee Spaeny.
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