Actor Jeremy Renner reflected on the excruciating pain he endured when he was run over by a snow plow in January 2023 — a terrifying ordeal that left him with over 38 broken bones — and how his road to recovery has given him a new perspective on life.
The scare unfolded on New Year’s Day near his home in Reno, Nevada, when he was clearing snow with his nephew.
Renner, 53, known for his role as Hawkeye in Disney’s Marvel superhero franchise, had stepped down from the cab of his massive PistenBully snow groomer. As he was talking with his nephew, the 14,000-pound machine rolled forward.
Renner made a “nanosecond judgment call” and tried to jump back into the cab of the machine to shut it down, he recalled in an interview with Men’s Health published Tuesday.
But his foot got caught in the huge treads of the groomer — similar to a tank — and they pulled his body under.
“I remember every undulation. I remember my head cracking on the thing and it just pressing on me — it’s exactly like you think it would feel. An immovable object and a crushing force, and something’s gotta give. But thank God my skull didn’t fully give,” he told the magazine.
“And then it kept going.Undulate, undulate, undulate, undulate. Cheekbone broke, eye socket broke, and then from the crushing of getting run over by the machine, my eye bulged out. I could see my left eyeball with my right eyeball,” he said.
“I was screaming for a breath. I needed to shove all my energy of air out just so I could suck air back in," Renner recalled. "There was no breathing happening. It was a muscle I had to use topress,and it’s hard to use your stomach muscles when you have 14 broken ribs and a popped lung. I don’t know this at the time — I just needed to get air.”
Renner said he spent the first five minutes thinking about how to breathe. Then, after about 10 minutes, his neighbors appeared and called 911.
“My ribs are jabbing me and poking my lung. Mind you, my leg was twisted up like a pretzel — didn’t feel that s---! I’m thinking,‘Ooo, s---, that’s gonna hurt later. Ooo, that’s my eyeball — that’s kinda weird!’I’m like,‘S---, I wonder if this breathing trouble is just a cramp. Let me just get this breathing right, and then I can go tell the family we’re not going skiing today,’” he said.
“But then I started getting really tired. My heart rate’s going lower, lower, lower.‘Huooohohh, huooohohh,’just this exhaustive breathing for 45 minutes. But with the exhaustion there was almost peace,” he said.
When the EMTs arrived, he thought: “I have to give my body up to them, because I’m cooked.”
From there Renner has fragmented memories of being airlifted to the hospital and spending days in intensive care.
He said he broke more than 38 bones: his ribs, pelvis, right knee, right ankle, left tibia, left ankle, right clavicle, right shoulder blade, his eye socket, jaw, mandible, wrist and left toes. His lung collapsed and was bruised, his liver was pierced from rib bone, he had a major laceration on the back of his head that was stapled shut, he couldn’t hear out of his right ear drum, and he suffered a contusion and impact to left eye.
When he regained consciousness, he found himself surrounded by his family.
“I said give me a pencil — I was fully intubated, got the giant hose in me — I wrote, ‘Holy f---. I’m so sorry. I love you all so much.’ Seemed like a weird thing to say, but that was the driving energy of me waking in the first place, brother,” he said.
Renner, who is the oldest of seven children and described having a large, fiercely loving family full of kids, said he didn’t think twice about protecting his nephew in the accident.
“I’m not letting anybody get hurt on my watch. That’s why I put my f---ing own life on the line for my nephew. I’m not gonna let that thing f---ing crush him! ... I couldn’t live with that,” he said. “If it was the other way around, if I didn’t get back on that thing and then it crushed him ... I would not be a good man right now. ... I’d be f---ing haunted.”
Renner, known for roles in action franchises like "The Avengers" and "Mission: Impossible," said he had no idea he’d get hurt.
“I figured, 'No problem,I got this, I’ll just dive across these tracks, shut off a button, piece of cake!’”
Since the accident, he has undergone physical therapy and interventions like red light therapy andhyperbaric chamber therapy, and he has returned to work on season three of the Paramount Plus show "Mayor of Kingstown," on which he plays Mike McLusky.
But it wasn't an easy comeback. He said that when filming starting on Jan. 9, he was "fragile."
“We were walking around on ice, and I have no energy. I was falling asleep. But I think it’ll be the best season yet because of it. Don’t get me wrong, Mike’s still Mike — he’s still the guy you want as your friend. But it’s more emotional, becauseI’mmore emotional,” he said.
A key part of his return to work was a shift in perspective.
“The last thing I wanted to do — to be honest with you, I almost pulled shoot and doing this show — was fiction. ... I gotta live in real reality here, because these bones and these joints — and I gotta go say fake lines and fake words and pretend to be . . . what?" he said. "Here’s how I shifted it, because I only have control of my perspective: I’m coming to Pittsburgh to recover in my body and get better every f---ing day,and I’m gonna do this show on the side. Instead of it being the other way around.”
The accident also taught him to receive love that was flooding in from family and friends.
“There’s a lot of people that love me. And I had no idea. I had to learn how to receive all this love, and it’s not easy. From people you don’t even know, even. Why is this accident such a thing? But then I said, 'F---, stop asking why. Just receive it,'” he said. “I was famous for having a bow and arrow; now I’m famous for overcoming something as a man.”
Marlene Lenthang
Breaking News Reporter
