Jeremy Renner explains how his near-fatal accident changed his acting career

Jeremy Renner says his near-fatal snowplough accident has completely changed the way he thinks about acting and his whole career.

On 1 January 2023, the Marvel star was struck by a snowplough in an effort to save his nephew from harm, giving him critical injuries to his chest and legs. He was airlifted to a local hospital near Washoe Country, Nevada and thereafter his representatives confirmed that he was in a stable but critical condition.

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Just a couple of days later, Renner posted an image of himself in hospital on Instagram while also thanking fans for their support. Two weeks after that, he was released home to continue his recovery and he later revealed that the accident broke 30 bones in his body.

His career is finally back on track, too, and has been working on projects like Mayor of Kingstown and the upcoming Knives Out sequel, Wake Up Dead Man.

“It was kind of a struggle coming back to fiction, when my life is more non-fiction than non-fiction can really be,” he told Empire.

“It’s, ‘Am I gonna walk right again?’, and how much brain-focus it takes to sit and stand and lie down. To exist requires so much of my mind, my attention, my focus, that to go back to work and say these lines on a page, that was bullshit. ‘What am I doing? I don’t think I’m ready for playing make-believe yet.’”

A new focus on family for Jeremy Renner

Renner revealed that, when he thought he was about to die on that day in 2023, he only saw images of his family, not of anything he has done in his career which means his focus is now undoubtely on those closest to him.

“The decision-making is, ‘I’ll never work again unless it’s with the people I want to work with, and my family can be there, or my daughter can be there, or my friends can be there’,” he explained.

“I didn’t see any of my career, or my jobs, when I died. Nothing. Not one clip. It was all just the love experiences that I had. So I’ll continue to water that garden with the people I love. I took 15 family members last summer to shoot Knives Out in London, and I only did it because I could bring them all.”