Jeremy Renner has recounted the gruesome details of the injuries he sustained during his freak snow plough accident.
On New Year’s Day in January 2023, the Hawkeye star was left in a critical condition after being run over by his 14,000-pound PistenBully snowcat. He was airlifted to hospital, where he underwent several surgeries to treat his injuries.
“[I] broke 38 bones,” Renner said during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “It was brutal,” he added.
When asked how much of his body was now made of metal, the actor touched the lower part of his leg, saying: “Well, this is metal.” He then added that “half my face is metal” and “all the right side of my back is metal”.
The actor went on to explain that he sustained “14 breaks in the ribs” before adding that one eyeball was hanging out of his head.
“You see your eye, with your other eye, because my eyeball was out,” he said. ‘So you just have weird things go through your head. It’s like, ‘Well, I guess that’s real, but I’ll worry about that later.’
“And I look at my legs. They were all twisted up, and ‘I’ll worry about that later’ because I got to worry about breathing first, right?”
A shocked Fallon asked if Renner had panicked during the incident, to which the actor replied: “No, you can’t. You die then.”
Viewing the near-death experience as a positive life lesson, he said: “[You’re] being tested to your limits, your physical limits, your spiritual limits, your emotional limits. It’s like, I won’t have a bad day for the rest of my life. It’s impossible, right? There’s that gift.
“In order to walk, you have to put one foot down and then another foot in front of it, and then you’re walking. Just like breathing, I had to exhale with all my might, so I can suck air back in.”
He added: “Didn’t know I had a popped lung and all this other stuff going on, but I just had to breathe. If I didn’t breathe, then I would’ve been gone.”
Having made a full recovery, Renner has now returned to work. In a recent interview with Good Morning America, he discussed how it felt being back on set of his Paramount+ crime thriller, Mayor of Kingstown.
“Starting the season this year at the beginning of the year was a little dicey, strength-wise, but by the end of it, usually you’re pretty shattered energy-wise but I feel pretty strong,” he said. “I had to physically and emotionally lean on the cast and crew to get through the days. They compensated with scheduling and stuff, so I could get stronger.”
Back in January this year, the Avengers star spoke out about his “poor nephew” who was with him at the time of accident.
“My poor nephew who was there with me on that day, I gave him images he can never unsee,” Renner said. “But I know that my healing would be healing for him.”