Jeremy Renner has opened up about his reasons for refusing to return to the Mission: Impossible film series.

The Hawkeye star featured in two of the Tom Cruise-led action blockbusters: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in 2011, and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation in 2015.

However, Renner did not return for the two films that followed in 2018 (Fallout) and 2023 (Dead Reckoning – Part One), with his character William Brandt having retired from the spy force at the end of Rogue Nation.

And now, in an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actor has revealed that he was in fact invited by the films’ producers to reprise the Brandt character in Fallout, but he was told it would be to shoot for one week, during which Brandt would be killed off.

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“I remember they tried to bring me over[seas] for a week so they could kill my character, and I was like, ‘No, you don’t get to do that. You’re not going to drag me over there and just kill my character,’ like get out of here!” Renner said (via Variety). “If you’re going to do this and you’re going to use my character, you’re going to do it right.”

“I yelled at [director Christopher McQuarrie],” he joked. “Dude, you’re not going to do this to me like that, you’re not going to do me wrong.”

In another recent interview, Renner shed more light on why he actually left the franchise in the first place. Speaking to Collider, he explained that at the time he wanted to focus on being an active father to his daughter, Ava.

“I was supposed to do more with them,” he said. “I love those guys. I love Tom so much. 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.”

He did then say that he would “jump” at the chance to return to the series in the future, should the opportunity arise. “I’d always jump into a Mission: Impossible anytime and back into Brandt. It’s great,” he said.

Renner also recently opened up about the gruesome details of his freak snow plough accident, revealing that his eye was left hanging out of his head.

On New Year’s Day in January 2023, the actor star was left in a critical condition after being run over by his 14,000-pound PistenBully snowcat. He was airlifted to hospital, where he underwent several surgeries to treat his injuries.

“You see your eye, with your other eye, because my eyeball was out,” he said. ‘So you just have weird things go through your head. It’s like, ‘Well, I guess that’s real, but I’ll worry about that later.’”

Renner was recently announced as the latest addition to the cast of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. The third instalment of the Knives Out series is due out in 2025 and will also star Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Josh O’Connor (Challengers) and Caile Spaeny (Priscilla), while Daniel Craig will return as the eccentric detective Benoit Blanc.