Although his character was missing in action from Avengers: Infinity War, Jeremy Renner will still be appearing on the big screen this summer in the comedy Tag. The movie tells the story of a group of childhood friends who every year reunite for an intense game of tag. As Jeremy Renner found out, tag is a rough game. The actor broke both of his arms while filming a stunt for the movie, leaving Hawkeye with a fractured elbow and wrist, and thus ill-equipped for childhood games or archery. Co-star Jon Hamm described the situation, saying:
We had several on-set injuries. The most notable being - I wasn't there that day, so it's impossible to blame this on me - Jeremy Renner, who broke both of his arms at the same time. Day three of production. We had 40 more days to go. Keep in mind this is a man who's done a hundred Avengers movies and been fine. And he does a movie about playing tag: both arms. Like firewood. Just snapped like a matchstick.
That is a graphic description which sounds deeply unpleasant. To occur so early in production too had to be quite difficult considering that Jeremy Renner's character Jerry is the all-star, never-it, king of tag in the movie, and likely has a major physical role. It's funny too, because usually when you hear about a movie with multiple injuries, it's Tom Cruise in a Mission: Impossible movie, defying the laws of physics and the healing rate of the human body, but this is a comedy. As Jon Hamm notes to Ellen Degeneres, while also claiming no responsibility, Jeremy Renner is a guy who has done several superhero movies, and yet he gets injured basically playing a game of tag. The irony is overwhelming.
This makes you wonder if the people this movie is based on have suffered injuries in their annual games. Hopefully there is a mini-documentary on the Blu-ray about them. Jon Hamm doesn't specify exactly what stunt injured Jeremy Renner, but he apparently wasn't even the only person to get injured, which just goes to show that adult tag is not for the faint of heart. Yet unlike Mission: Impossible - Fallout, production did not need to be shut down to allow Jeremy Renner to heal. Instead they just said "We'll fix it in post," as Jon Hamm explained:
He wore kind of green screen casts that we eventually painted out in the edit.
That is amazing and must have made for quite the scene on set as Jeremy Renner was being chased around by his co-stars while wearing green casts over his arm like Cable or the Winter Soldier. What an odd and unexpected use of special effects. Fortunately the VFX artists presumably only had to make his arms look normal and nothing too fancy or complex. It also speaks to Jeremy Renner's toughness to just keep on working while he healed. You can hear Jon Hamm's full interview on Ellen, including some info about the real events Tag is based on in the video below.
In addition to Jeremy Renner and Jon Hamm, Tag boasts a talented cast including Isla Fisher, Rashida Jones, Jake Johnson, Ed Helms and Hannibal Buress. Tag races into theaters on June 15. Check out our guide for some of this summer's other under-the-radar movies, and for all the latest on the injury rate of tag and hide-and-go-seek players, stay tuned to CinemaBlend.
