This past week Empire Magazine broke the news that Hurt Locker actor Jeremy Renner had met with Marvel and talked to them about a possible role as Hawkeye in the highly anticipated adaptation of Marvel’s The Avengers comic. Well now SuperHeroHype have managed to catch up with Renner, at the Independent Film Gotham Awards, and asked him for an update on the Hawkeye story:
I haven’t heard anything since I talked to them three weeks ago. The last I knew is that they still have to find their director for The Avengers, that’s where he’s really going to show up. They were just talking, ‘Like maybe we should consider maybe hiring Hawkeye now’ but there’s no director on The Avengers so they don’t really want to force-feed the director, ‘Here’s the whole cast.’ It’s a big role so they didn’t want to do that to the director, so I think they might wait. I know they’re interested, I’m interested, so we’ll see if it works out.
Renner went on to talk about how the guys at Marvel talked him into the role, and how they’d approach the look of the character:
They sold me on the idea, too, because I love the idea that Hawkeye’s really not a superhero. He’s just a man with a high skill set, so I can relate to [that]. The Marvel guys are great for how they made Iron Man to be, ‘Oh, that’s actually plausible’ so I bought it and I love that. They’re really, really smart guys and I’d love to work for ‘em, and we’ll see if it works out.
[As for his appearance] it’s going to be modernized, it’s not going to be the guy with the big purple [mask], it’s not going to be a guy in tights. It’s going to be a guy in sunglasses and a vest. He’s going to be more modernized and I’m gonna say, ‘A cooler-looking version’ and not the big weird costume he had on. I don’t think they’re going that route.
Sounds like Marvel’s plan is to follow the current Ultimate universe design of the character, and make him more of an all-round marksman type rather than just the arrow-shooting hero he is in the 616 universe… I’m excited to see if Jeremy Renner does get the role, I can really see him as Hawkeye and seeing his performance in The Hurt Locker will convince anyone that he could bring the perfect balance of humanity and intensity that the role requires.
The Avengers is set for a May 4th, 2012 release…
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[...] in final negotiations to join the cast of The Avengers as Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, confirming the rumours from last November. At the end of last year, Renner talked to Empire about the possibilities of [...]