After making his return to the television space last year for the first time since his snowplow accident with Mayor of Kingstown Season 3, Jeremy Renner is months away from appearing in his first movie since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame (minus a voice cameo in Black Widow). Renner is contributing to the 2025 movies schedule by starring in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, i.e. Knives Out 3. However, he only agreed to do this Netflix subscription-exclusive feature for one reason, and it had to do with him reevaluating his professional life following the accident.
Following his physical recovery after nearly dying from the snowplow that ran over him on January 1, 2023, Renner decided that he wouldn’t take on a project if it didn’t line up with his family priorities. Luckily for him, Wake Up Dead Man filled that criteria, as he informed Empire while promoting his book My Next Breath:
The decision-making is, ‘I’ll never work again unless it’s with the people I want to work with, and my family can be there, or my daughter can be there, or my friends can be there.’ I didn’t see any of my career, or my jobs, when I died. Nothing. Not one clip. It was all just the love experiences that I had. So I’ll continue to water that garden with the people I love. I took 15 family members last summer to shoot Knives Out in London, and I only did it because I could bring them all.
So if the Wake Up Dead Man production hadn’t been able to accomodate Jeremy Renner’s family coming along with him to London, we’d be seeing a different person inhabit his role come this winter. Fortunately, that didn’t end up happening, though you have to admire Renner’s conviction for placing his family first and foremost. At this stage of his career, he can afford to turn down a project if he’s not able to spend time with his loved ones as he’s working on it.
It should be noted that Jeremy Renner has already left an impact on the Knives Out world, as his likeness was used for a bottle of hot sauce in Glass Onion. However, he won’t be playing himself in Wake Up Dead Man, but rather a character named Dr. Nat Sharp. Just like with the first two movies, Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc will be investigating a murder, and Dr. Sharp will somehow factor into the nefarious goings on.
These two are joined in the cast by Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack and Thomas Haden Church. While it remains to be seen if Wake Up Dead Man will have any kind of special theatrical release like Glass Onion did, it’ll be available to stream on Netflix starting December 12.
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