Jeremy Renner: After near-fatal injury, returning to 'Mayor of Kingstown' helped recovery

Mayor of Kingstown star and executive producer Jeremy Renner tells Yahoo Entertainment that getting back to work on the Paramount+ series after a devastating snowplow accident in 2023 was an important step in his recovery. “This is my ‘getting outside the front gate,’” says Renner. “Stop just doing recovery and just go out and live life, do life stuff. And let that be part of the recovery.”

Video Transcript

Ii, I defined retirement is like, just doing what you wanna do with the people you want to do it with, you know, then it's not even work and like, like, like the mayor, you know, I love the character and, and I love everybody that I'm working with.

So, I mean, it's not really, I mean, it's, it is a lot of effort.

Um, it's, it's a lot of, I have shoulder, um, and certainly had to consider to, to come back into it because I know how exhausting it is when I'm perfectly healthy and when you're, you know, barely kind of being able to walk very far, you know, I can maybe walk 100 yards normal, maybe.

But like, that was my endurance, my endurance was crap.

And that was really on, on the fence if, like, do I, how do I come back?

And my, I use the show is like them.

That's, this is my getting outside the front gate stop, just doing recovery and just go out and live life, do life stuff and that, that'd be part of the recovery.

And I had a lot of people helping, um, listening to my body as much as I had to listen to my body and, and we, we did it as a unit, you know, it took all of us to kind of get through it and uh it was great, but yeah, there was, I had to do it at some point at some time.

So you gotta, you gotta just take the band aid off, right and go for it.

Um like anything, right?

Gotta be courageous enough.

And like what I'm gonna do just fail.

And then the worst that could happen is like, sorry guys, I failed you and I have to go back home, right.

That was the worst that could happen.

And then a lot of everybody's out of a job.

That sucks.

Well, we're not gonna allow that happen either.

You know, especially after the long break that a lot of people had with the strikes, the writers strike, the actor strike.

And, you know, there's a lot of people had a job for a long time.

So that was also really important to me to, to get people employed again and um and important for me to get on my feet again.

So let's all do this together, man.