Hawkeye actor Jeremy Renner has finally shed some light on why we haven’t seen a second season of the Marvel series—and perhaps why the character hasn’t appeared at all since the first season.
In an interview with High Performance, Renner revealed he was offered “half” the salary he earned for the first season of Hawkeye.
“They asked me to do a Season 2, and they offered me half the money. I’m like, wow, it’s going to take me twice the amount of work for half the amount of money,” Renner said. “I’m sorry, why? Did you think I’m only half the Jeremy because I got run over?”
Renner added that he told the “penny pinchers” at Disney to “go fly a kite.” Despite the disagreement, the actor said he still loves the character and would be happy to return for a second season.
The accident Renner referred to occurred on New Year’s Day in 2023. While saving his nephew from being pinned by a moving Snowcat snow removal vehicle, Renner was critically injured when the machine rolled over him.
In his new memoir My Next Breath, Jeremy Renner states that he believes he briefly died during the snowplow accident. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Renner writes:
“After about 30 minutes on the ice, breathing manually for so long—an effort akin to doing 10 or 20 push-ups per minute for half an hour … that’s when I died. I could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once. In death, there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever.”
The actor broke 38 bones in the incident and required his eye to be duct-taped back together. Since the accident, Renner has starred in the third season of the Paramount+ series Mayor of Kingstown and is set to appear in the upcoming third Knives Out film, titled Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
Hawkeye is streaming exclusively on Disney+, with the full first season available now on the platform.
