Jeremy Renner says Mission: Impossible required too much “time away,” but he’d come back now

Jeremy Renner is a Franchise Guy—appearing in Mission: Impossible, an attempted Bourne reboot, and most notably, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Add on leading a Taylor Sheridan-backed television series (Mayor Of Kingstown), and you’ve got an actor with the kind of success and stability other artists would kill for. But after Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, Renner chose to walk away from that particular role as one of Tom Cruise’s trusted teammates. In a new interview with Collider, Renner explained why.

“Yeah. I had to leave that. I was supposed to do more with them. I love those guys. I love Tom [Cruise] so much,” Renner told the outlet. “We had so much fun, and I love that character a lot. It requires a lot of time away. It’s all in London. I had to go be a dad. It just wasn’t gonna work out then.”

The subtext here is that Mission: Impossible required a lot of time away… on top of how much time he already had to be away for the MCU, which generally filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. Renner had M:I and Avengers movies coming out basically back-to-back, which is a pretty intensive schedule for anyone to handle, let alone the father of a young child. Previously, late-era M:I director Christopher McQuarrie pegged this as the reason for Renner’s absence in Fallout. “Jeremy had his commitment to Avengers, which ironically they ended up not exercising, and we didn’t know what the [sixth Mission] movie was, so we couldn’t provide a schedule. We needed absolute freedom,” he shared with Empire magazine. “The unfortunate thing for Jeremy is that he got caught in this perfect storm of, one can’t use you and one doesn’t know how to, given the massive complications they had with Avengers.”

At one point, Renner was actually rumored to take over as lead of the M:I franchise, while Cruise’s Hunt would’ve taken a step back and become the secretary of the Impossible Mission Force. McQuarrie taking over as director of Ghost Protocol put the kibosh on that plan, and Cruise now plans to keep making M:I movies as long as he’s physically able. McQuarrie actually plotted to kill someone off for Fallout, and figured it might as well be Renner, since he couldn’t be in the movie. “So I said to Renner, ‘Hey listen, I have this idea for an opening sequence where you sacrifice yourself to save the team, and that the mission-gone-wrong not only involves losing the plutonium, but involves the death of a team member,’” the filmmaker said to Empire. “And Jeremy was like, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ […] He was smart not to take the short paycheck for three days of work and getting blown up.”

Instead, his character William Brandt is still alive and well, meaning he could return to the series at any time. “Maybe now that my daughter is older that could happen,” Renner, who is still recovering from a near-fatal snow plow accident, pondered to Collider. “I’d always jump into a Mission: Impossible anytime and back into Brandt. It’s great.”