“I can’t just play pretend now.”

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

Renner suffered blunt force trauma to the chest in January 2023 after an accident with a snowplow that knocked him over.

“I just don’t have the energy for it.” I don’t have the fuel,” Renner told the site Without intelligence podcast, hosted by Will Arnett, Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman. “I have so much fuel to put into this reality, this body, all of that. I can’t play pretend now. Because it takes a long time to get here every day just so that I can think a positive thought, so that I can progress, so that I can always continue to grow.

THE Mayor of Kingstown The star returned to acting to begin filming season 3 and admitted he was “very terrified,” adding, “Because I have to do, like, a fucking fiction?” I always try to live in reality, I try to live. So it was a difficult line for me to cross. It was a big stretch. It was very, very difficult for me mentally to overcome this obstacle.

He continued: “I still struggle with it sometimes, like I don’t take it very seriously. I’m in a character that I can embody very well and I know the series very well, so it was easy for me to jump back into it. But if it was a very demanding role, I wouldn’t have been able to accept it. Not a challenge in the sense that – because the show is a challenge, but it’s if I had to play Dahmer or something like that, something so far from me.

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