Jeremy Renner on refusing to return to ‘Mission: Impossible III’

Everett Collection

After playing in two Impossible mission movies – 2011 Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and 2015 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Jeremy Renner speaks out about his refusal to return for the third installment.

In an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Renner told host Josh Horowitz that it was too big a time commitment because his daughter was so young at the time that he couldn’t stay on set that long. But he noted that his interest waned after learning he had to shoot for a week so his character, IMF agent William Brandt, could be killed off.

“I remember they tried to take me overseas for a week so they could kill off my character, and I was like, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ You’re not going to drag me out there and just kill my character, like, get out of here!'” Renner said. “If you do that and you use my character, you’ll do it right.

“I yelled at (director Christopher McQuarrie),” Renner added with a laugh. “Dude, you’re not going to do it to me like that; you’re not going to hurt me.

Renner recently told Collider in an interview that now that his daughter Ava is older, he would be open to returning.

“I was supposed to do more with them,” Renner said of the Impossible mission casting. “I love these guys. I love Tom so much. We had so much fun and I really like this character. This requires a lot of free time. It’s all in London. I had to become a father. It just wasn’t going to work at that point. Maybe now that my daughter is older it could happen. I always jumped in a Impossible mission at any time and back to Brandt. It’s good.”

You can watch the entire podcast below.