The deal is done. For close to two months, Universal Pictures and director Tony Gilroy were searching for someone to play the “new Jason Bourne” in a spinoff film titled The Bourne Legacy. Production is slated to begin in September.
What’s interesting is that when we originally reported on the actors Tony Gilroy had met, Jeremy Renner was not one of them. Most likely a scheduling issue, since Renner was working on Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol with Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Josh Holloway (Lost) and Simon Pegg and director Brad Bird (The Incredibles).
Similar to the original trilogy starring Matt Damon, Renner will play an operative from a covert government program that is even more dangerous than the Treadstone brainwashing program that hatched Bourne.
Either Tony Gilroy or some executive at Universal got a peek at some dailies for Mission: Impossible and saw something they liked, because Renner will essentially be playing another covert operative.
Renner beat out the likes of Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom, upcoming remake/prequel of The Thing), Dominic Cooper (The Devil’s Double), Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) and Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). Other names in the mix included Taylor Kitsch and Anthony Mackie who, coincidentally, played Renner’s co-star in The Hurt Locker and most recently alongside Mr. Jason Bourne, Matt Damon, in The Adjustment Bureau.
