Jeremy Renner has no energy for “challenging” roles after his accident

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Jeremy Renner recently admitted in a “Smartless” podcast interview that he “doesn’t have the energy” to take on more demanding tasks while recovering from his near-fatal snow plowing accident.

“I just don’t have the energy. I don’t have the fuel,” Renner said. “I have to put so much fuel into this reality, into this body, into all this stuff. I can’t just pretend right now. Because that takes a lot of time to come right here every day just so I can have a positive thought, so I can make progress, so I can keep growing.”

In January 2023, Renner was hospitalized for blunt chest trauma and orthopedic injuries after his Sno-Cat, a large snow plow weighing over 14,000 pounds, ran over him. In January of this year, he returned to the set of Mayor of Kingstown to film the third season.

Renner told Smartless podcast hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes that he was “very scared” about returning to acting.

“Because I’m supposed to fucking do fiction? I’m still trying to live in reality, I’m trying to live. So it was a difficult boundary for me to cross,” he explained. “It was a big challenge. It was a big, big challenge for me to get over that hurdle.”

“I still struggle with it sometimes, I don’t take it too seriously. I’m playing a role that I can play very well and I know the show very well, so it was easy for me to slip back into it,” Renner said of his role as Mike McLusky in “Mayor of Kingstown.” “But if it had been a very demanding role, I wouldn’t have been able to take it. Not in the sense that – because the show is demanding, but it would be like I had to play Dahmer or something, something that is so far removed from me.”

Renner will star in Rian Johnson’s crime thriller “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” his first film since his snowplow accident. The cast also includes Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Josh O’Connor and Cailee Spaeny, and Daniel Craig reprises the role of private investigator Benoit Blanc. Details on the characters of the “Knives Out” newcomers have not yet been announced.

Listen to Renner’s full interview on the Smartless podcast below.