Jeremy Renner is too busy healing in reality to play make-believe

Jeremy Renner was once a blockbuster king, but these days, “I just don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the fuel,” he says on the Smartless podcast (via Entertainment Weekly). Following his near-fatal snowplow accident, he’s not really interested in taking on more challenging roles because “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.”

The Avengers star was actually “terrified” to return to set, “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 explains. “It was a big stretch. It was very, very challenging for me mentally to get over that hump.” Renner says he probably couldn’t have gotten back into acting if he was returning to a “very challenging role.” Not that his comeback gig, Mayor Of Kingstown, doesn’t have its challenges, but “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.” (Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery must not be too much of a stretch, either.)

Even then, he almost considered calling the whole thing off. In a separate interview with Men’s Health (which includes a truly gruesome description of his mindset as he was being crushed by a 14,000-plus pound snowplow), he admitted to being “pretty fucking fragile” when he finally returned to the set of the Taylor Sheridan show. “But I think it’ll be the best season yet because of it. Don’t get me wrong, Mike’s still Mike—he’s still the guy you want as your friend. But it’s more emotional, because I’m more emotional. Because, dude, the last thing I wanted to do—to be honest with you, I almost pulled shoot and doing this show—was fiction,” he reiterated. “I got no time to fucking pretend, man! So here’s how I shifted it, because I only have control of my perspective: I’m coming to Pittsburgh to recover in my body and get better every fucking day, and I’m gonna do this show on the side. Instead of it being the other way around.”