Yahoo News Jeremy Renner Reveals He Was “Terrified” to Return to Acting Following Near-Fatal Accident
Jeremy Renner discussed how the thought of returning to acting after a near-fatal accident 18 months ago left him “terrified” and shared how he now has little appetite for new, challenging acting roles as he is focused on his physical and mental recovery.
“I just don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the fuel,” Renner told hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes on their Smartless podcast during an episode released Monday. “I have so much fuel to put into this reality, this body, all this stuff. I can’t just go play make-believe right now. Because that takes a lot of time to get right here every day just so I can, you know, have a positive thought, so I can progress, so I can always keep growing.”
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Renner, whose Paramount+ series Mayor of Kingstown is currently airing its third season, broke more than 30 bones in his body in the New Year’s Day accident in 2023. As he tried to clear out heavy snow, he was run over by a 14,300-pound snowcat at his home in Reno, Nevada. Renner said that his rib cage was rebuilt with metal, along with plates in his face to support his eye sockets and titanium rods in one of his legs.
Renner, who’s also well known for playing Hawkeye in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and earned an Oscar nomination for his breakout role in The Hurt Locker, told the hosts that taking on a new role is something he wasn’t ready for because acting in something heavy just isn’t feasible for him.
“Because I’m to do, like, fucking fiction? I’m still trying to live in reality, I’m trying to live,” Renner said. “So it was a hard line for me to cross.… It was a big stretch. It was very, very challenging for me mentally to get over that hump,” he said in response to Bateman’s comment that his job got more fake as his life got all too real.
“I still struggle with it sometimes.… I don’t take it super seriously. I’m in a character that I can do very well and I know the show very well, so it was easy for me to kind of slide back into it. But if it was a very challenging role, I couldn’t have taken it. Not challenging in the sense that…because the show’s challenging, but it’s if I had to go play [Jeffrey] Dahmer or something, something so far from me,” he said.
In the episode, the actor also revealed to listeners of the hit podcast that he is writing a book about his life over the past years as he has recovered physically and mentally from his brush with death.
“I’m going to spend the whole summer doing it — hopefully I can get it out by year’s end or beginning of next year,” Renner said.
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