No Hawkeye for Renner

Jeremy Renner’s potent performance in THE HURT LOCKER finally got the actor some much-deserved attention, but it doesn’t sound like we’ll be seeing him share a screen with comic book heavy-hitters like IRON MAN.

About a month ago, Renner said he’d been approached to play Marvel’s archer (or Ultimate Marvel’s marksman) Hawkeye in future Marvel flicks: “I met with the Marvel guys, actually, but we didn’t talk about Captain America. But one of the writers, Zak Penn, we’ve become friends over time and he was thinking maybe Hawkeye could be interesting. He sounds like an interesting character. If I was a betting man, I would bet that Hawkeye would probably show up in Thor, and then be in The Avengers. But do I know for sure? I can’t say. But I’d love for that to happen. It’d be fun.”

But unfortunately the arrows and/or bullets weren’t meant to fly from Renner’s hands. As he just recently updated to Movieline: “That was just one of those things that got blown way out of proportion. It was an idea. Those Marvel guys, I’m a big fan of them. They’re so smart about how they want to do these things — they have CAPTAIN AMERICA, and THOR coming around, IRON MAN 2, and then I happen to know Zak Penn, who’s writing THE AVENGERS. So they thought Hawkeye is an interesting role, and asked me if I knew anything about him. I said no, so they gave me their sort of spiel on what he was, and I thought that it was kind of interesting. The only reason it came out this early, because AVENGERS is two years away, is that they’re thinking OK, we may throw him in THOR , we may not, as a cameo. You know what I mean? So there’s truth that we talked about it, but there’s no truth to me doing it.“

Maybe it will still come around — Renner already has his next (Ben Affleck’s heist movie THE TOWN) in the can and doesn’t seem to have anything else booked yet, so maybe they’ll find a way to make a deal for Marvel’s deadshot.