When you experience something that nearly ends your life, you might have a hard time jumping back into fiction. That’s what Jeremy Renner experienced after his 2023 accident, which left him with blunt chest trauma and more than three dozen broken bones.
Despite his injuries, Jeremy Renner continued to fight, making a remarkable recovery while also promoting and signing on for various projects, one of which was a docuseries for Disney+, which may have offered some grounding that he needed. Another was a memoir, My Next Breath, which came out earlier this year. As he told Empire, “It was kind of a struggle coming back to fiction, when my life is more non-fiction than non-fiction can really be. It’s, ‘Am I gonna walk right again?’, and how much brain-focus it takes to sit and stand and lie down. To exist requires so much of my mind, my attention, my focus, that to go back to work and say these lines on a page, that was bullsh*t. ‘What am I doing? I don’t think I’m ready for playing make-believe yet.’”
Eventually, Jeremy Renner was able to see why films and television are so important to him, adding that there is a certain experience to doing work like that that might be important to recovery. “I got to a place physically where I thought, ‘I’m ready to go back. I want to get back to life, I have to be social, and also get people back in their jobs.’ I struggled the first couple of weeks, and had a lot of people help me on the show, because I did Mayor Of Kingstown Season 3. I did a stunt in the second week and we were all wondering, ‘What’s gonna happen?’ And it went great, and there was a big sigh of relief. It was pretty emotional.”
At the same time, Jeremy Renner also knows that he has to be particular about his choices in which projects he signs on for, as he has added certain stipulations that have to fit, otherwise he won’t get in front of the camera. “The decision-making is, ‘I’ll never work again unless it’s with the people I want to work with, and my family can be there, or my daughter can be there, or my friends can be there.’ I didn’t see any of my career, or my jobs, when I died. Nothing. Not one clip. It was all just the love experiences that I had. So I’ll continue to water that garden with the people I love. I took 15 family members last summer to shoot Knives Out in London, and I only did it because I could bring them all.”
Jeremy Renner will be playing Dr. Nat Sharp in Wake Up Dead Man, out on December 12th. Other than that, he will be promoting season four of Mayor of Kingstown and suggested he might be ready for return for season two of Hawkeye at some point.
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