No, that wasn’t a subtitle error, and your ears didn’t fool you: At the end of “Kugelblitz”, the fourth episode of The Umbrella Academy Season 3, that was actually Jeremy Renner’s cover of House of the Rising Sun dubbing the plot.
[Ed. note: Light spoilers for episode 4 of Umbrella Academy season 3, which is now out on Netflix.]
The song technically concludes the episode (although the opening features the much more famous iteration of the song from The Animals), which adds a kind of spooky charm to the continuation of Harlan’s story. We see how Sissy’s son was inadvertently responsible for the deaths of the Umbrella Academy mothers and helped create the titular ball of lightning that is currently endangering the world. In his deep grief over the loss of his own mother, Harlan used the powers he inherited from Viktor in 1963 and accidentally killed the women before they could give birth.
Unfortunately, the hit can distract you a little from the pathos of the scene. You can imagine that Umbrella Academy that Jeremy Renner has a music career would be a little shocking. But welcome to the herd; In addition to being an actor, Renner is also a singer-songwriter who plays guitar, keyboards and drums. He has released two EPssang on several movie soundtracks and even contributed to the movie’s soundtrack Arctic dogs.
So Jeremy Renner is the logical person to land the belly punch of that moment in Episode 4, especially when Umbrella Academy Co-creator and vocalist of My Chemical Romance The rendition of Gerard Way is right there? Well, all I can tell you is that Netflix series showrunner Steve Blackman knew people might be a little surprised. But he also felt that the cover worked perfectly at the moment.
“I needed a different version of it, and there are a thousand different versions of this song,” Blackman tells Polygon. “But Jeremy Renners had a really interesting ending; The way he brought out the last part of the song really suited what Viktor was doing. […] It stuck with me what the emotional place was.”
In a show full of remarkable needle drops and dance sequences, the hit cover might not stick in the audience’s minds in the same way. But if so, then the lyric video should be your next foray into Renner’s world.
Additional reporting by Petrana Radulovic.
