‘I won’t have a bad day for the rest of my life’: Jeremy Renner on how snow plow accident changed his outlook on life
In January 2023, Jeremy Renner was in a near-fatal snowplow accident that left him with 38 broken bones.
Over a year after the accident, Renner appeared on Wednesday night’s episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to recount the “brutal” experience.
Before requesting a play-by-play of the accident, Fallon asked Renner if he felt comfortable talking about it.
“I think it’s pretty cathartic,” the Marvel actor responded. “It can be quite healing.”
Renner’s ‘eyeball was out’ after accident
Renner told Fallon that the snowplow accident impacted his loved ones as much as himself and that what happened to him “became much more other people’s story as it was mine.”
“It happened to my parents, happened to my poor daughter. It happened to my poor nephew. He was there,” Renner said. “So, the incident affects everybody, right?”
Renner and his family were “trapped in the house” for several days due to heavy amounts of snow. They lost electricity and several vehicles got buried by the storm. Renner was attempting to “clear the road” and pull vehicles loose when he was run over by a snowplow.
The actor was riding a Sno-Cat, which he assured Fallon he was used to operating, but due to “terrible conditions” the machine got loose.
“Pulling the truck out of the long driveway, got caught up ... the machine got out of my hands. And it was running into my nephew and gonna crush him between the truck and the thing,” Renner recalled. “So I jumped back on it — or tried to — and got caught up in the tracks ... and it broke 38 bones. It was brutal, dude.”
Renner revealed that his left leg, the right side of his back and half his face were all restored with metal.
“There was 14 breaks in the ribs and ... you see your eye with your other eye, because my eyeball was out,” he shared.
“So you just have weird things go through your head, right? It’s like, ‘Well, I guess that’s real, but, like, I’ll worry about that later.’ And I looked at my legs. They were all twisted up. ‘I’ll worry about that later,’ because I got to worry about breathing first.”
Fallon asked Renner if he panicked during the accident. Renner responded, “No. You can’t. You die then.”
Marvel actor Anthony Mackie was one of the first people Renner spoke to
Several of Renner’s Marvel castmates visited him while he recovered, Renner said.
Anthony Mackie, who stars alongside Renner as The Falcon, was one of his first visitors. Renner woke up in the hospital after being on life support for three or four days, and that’s when visitors, including Mackie, came.
“Anthony Mackie was actually one of the first people I saw when I woke up,” Renner said. “It’s like a living wake kind of thing. Everyone’s coming to say their goodbyes. But at least Mackie was there. He was really worried! He was in Las Vegas, so he was able to get to Reno pretty quickly.”
Renner continued, “To receive that much love is also a very difficult thing for anybody to do.”
‘I won’t have a bad day for the rest of my life’
“There are so many great gifts to being tested to your limits — your physical limits, your spiritual limits, emotional limits. I won’t have a bad day for the rest of my life. It’s impossible, right? There’s that gift,” Renner said.
The experience also taught him how to “not panic and how to focus,” he said.
During the accident, Renner popped a lung and had a difficult time breathing. He had to face the challenge “step by step,” a sentiment he has applied to his day to day life.
“If we get too stressed or if things get too difficult or it’s insurmountable odds or whatever it might be, just put one foot down then put another foot down.”
“I think I can achieve anything at this point,” he added.
