How Jeremy Renner Ended Up On The Umbrella Academy Season 3 Soundtrack

From the very beginning of the show's inception, music has always played a vital role in "The Umbrella Academy." Some of the show's most powerful moments, like the full house season 1 dance to "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tiffany or the massive fight sequence in season 2 set to the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" have become fan favorites, due to the oftentimes anachronistic usage. Hell, Klaus spends most of season 2 prophesying to his cultlike followers by quoting lines of songs that had yet to be written — in that timeline, at least. Season 3 of the hit dysfunctional super family series was no different, with the opening episode featuring a killer dance-off between the Umbrella Academy and rival timeline Sparrow Academy set to the undeniable banger that is Kenny Loggins' "Footloose."

The soundtrack of "The Umbrella Academy" is as much of a character as any of the Hargreeves kids, and it's equally as weird, ridiculous, and awesome as all the seven super siblings. It makes sense considering "The Umbrella Academy" comic book source material was written by everyone's emo boyfriend, Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance. So when an episode this season called for a cover of "House of the Rising Sun," many would have been comfortable with the MCR cover popping up. But showrunner Steve Blackman had a bit of a different sound in mind. In this instance, the savior of the people, the broken, and the damned ... was Jeremy Renner.

When you're known for being part of the most profitable superhero team in cinema history, sometimes people forget that the actors have a life outside of "assembling." Jeremy Renner has a relatively impressive music career, as a multi-instrument-playing singer-songwriter with two EPs, and multiple performances on film soundtracks. In episode 4 of "The Umbrella Academy" season 3, the episode opens with the most recognizable version of "House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals. However, after a lot of absolutely bananas reveals that could only exist in a show like "The Umbrella Academy," the episode ends with Renner's cover, serving as a poetic bookend to its events.

Renner's version has the same haunting presence as the original, but with a modern musicality with technological sound inclusions. "I needed a different version of it, and there's a thousand different versions of that song," Steve Blackman told Polygon in an interview. "But Jeremy Renner's had a really interesting ending; the way he brought out the sort of final bit of the song really worked with what Viktor was doing. ... It resonated with me in my mind of what the emotional place was." Renner's rendition works perfectly to cap the end of the episode, and in a weird way, is an even better fit than the MCR cover would have been, as someone who knows what it's like to have to try and save the universe.