When Marvel superhero movie star Jeremy Renner was seriously injured in a Sno-Cat accident that almost cost him his life at the start of 2023, he became determined to persevere through the many challenges that lay ahead. Jeremy endured nearly 40 broken bones, a collapsed lung, a pierced liver, a broken cheekbone and eye socket, and more. He was airlifted to hospital, where he spent 12 days with his family by his side.
Defying the odds
With extensive rehabilitation and physical therapy ahead, the future was uncertain. After the 14,300-lb. Sno-Cat rolled on top of him, some doctors said it could take years before Jeremy could walk again and that he would never run again. Those words only fueled the strong Avenger’s grit, and within three months, Jeremy Renner was walking with a cane. He even brought his cane to the red carpet, to the amazement of his co-stars. Within ten months, he was sprinting and running in his cushiony Brooks running shoes on his driveway. The accident ignited his creativity, and Jeremy released an album called Love and Titanium.
The Hawkeye actor powered through the pain, treatments, and uncertainty with commendable determination and, most importantly, a sense of humor. We interviewed Jeremy about his inspiring, long road to recovery.
Interview with Jeremy Renner
The Manual: For many years, you’ve been a much-loved action movie hero. How long have you been into fitness and running? What does running and fitness mean to you?
Jeremy Renner: I’ve always been a sprinter and had always been a sprinter in school. If I did anything, it was probably more hiking and sprinting uphill, like training stairs. I would sprint upstairs, and that kind of stuff was never long-distance running. Unless I was going through a breakup or I needed to emotionally repair because running is really good for that. Otherwise, I didn’t typically run. If I did, it would be a mile, maybe two miles, but that’s all my body typically allowed. I was more of a sprinter or hiker and did cross-fit. I wasn’t just going out for a run. That wasn’t my thing. It was as a kid but not as an adult.
TM: You’ve been known for your sense of humor. Do you think your sense of humor and laughter helped you through this experience?
JR: A sense of humor is important to have in all aspects of life; it’s helped me out through this experience, as well as other difficult times I’ve had to face. I used humor as a barometer to see how messed up or not messed up I was. I was being pumped with so many drugs it was hard to work out how sober I was, but I know that humor requires timing, intelligence, and the ability to read an audience. It requires a lot of your consciousness. So I’d say shit to people, and if they didn’t laugh, I knew I was really in trouble. Or at least, I knew that I wasn’t as lucid as I wanted to be, determined by how well my jokes were landing.
TM: The accident happened when you were protecting and watching out for your nephew. Have you always had a protective nature and a close family?
JR: Family was and continues to be my primary motivating factor to get better. I had certain milestones that I tried to create and hit for myself. Mainly because I wanted to relieve my daughter’s fears that her dad wasn’t going to be a dad anymore.
TM: While you waited for help to arrive in those first moments after the accident, what was going through your mind?
JR: My focus and energy was on breathing. You see your eye with your other eye because my eyeball was out. You have weird things go through your head like, “I guess that’s real, but I’ll worry about that later.” I look at my legs; they’re all twisted up. “I’ll worry about that later.” You have to worry about breathing first. You can’t [panic], you die then.
The real learning lessons from it are that there are so many great gifts of being tested to your limits, your physical limits, your spiritual limits, and your emotional limits. I won’t have a bad day for the rest of my life; it’s impossible. There’s that gift. Also, learning how to not panic and how to focus. In order to walk, you have to put one foot down, then another foot in front of it, and then you’re walking. It’s just like breathing. I had to exhale with all my might, so I could suck air back in. I didn’t know I had a popped lung and all this other stuff going on, but I just had to breathe.
TM: How long were you in the hospital, and was it difficult being away from your family during your extended hospital stay?
JR: I spent the first six days in the ICU in Reno before I was transferred to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In total, I was in the hospital for 12 days, and I was never alone; my family was by my side the entire time.
TM: We know fitness and mobility have always been important to you. Some doctors said you would never walk again. How did it feel not knowing at the time what the road to recovery would be like?
JR: Initially, doctors said it would take years before I walked again and within three months, I was walking with the assistance of a cane. The doctors also said I was never going to run again, and here I am partnered with Brooks running shoes, running. I’m pretty tenacious and stubborn, so my family says (laughing).
Every joint broke. So, it makes all those milestones more meaningful. I know doctors also don’t want to over-promise. They weren’t trying to bring me down and be heavy, but I was pretty shattered. I was a pretty shattered man. They were hopeful I was going to heal all right but didn’t think I was really going to be able to kind of move too much.
TM: How long were you in physical therapy, and what therapies do you think helped you the most?
JR: I’ll forever be in recovery; it never ends.
TM: We know Brooks running shoes, with the padding and support, was one of the items that helped you get back to walking and running. We were so happy to see the video of you running up the driveway in your cushiony Brooks shoes. How did these shoes play a role in your recovery?
JR: There’s so much cushion in , which is so good on my joints. The shoes gave me the confidence to try running down my steep driveway. That first run down the driveway was a big day for me. It gave me a lot of hope.
TM: During your recovery, how long was it before you could walk and run again for the first time, and how did that feel?
JR: My first run post-accident was at my 10-month mark, bringing us to over seven months of working at these running goals. I was on the treadmill with shoes Brooks sent me, but to really use them with gravity in the real world was on the day 10 months after the accident. Even though it wasn’t meant to be an important day, it became one of the most important days in my recovery, probably because there was zero expectation to it.
It was the day that I skipped down the driveway in the Ghost Max black shoes. I got to skip down the driveway, which I was feeling pretty good about, but then I decided to sprint back up with a high-knee sprint. I think because of the incline and the shoes, there wasn’t too much torque on all these busted garage sale parts of my legs. And it happened. I did it a couple of times. I didn’t expect to run. I didn’t try to run. I just went and did it. I didn’t think about it, and it all happened. That’s why it became one of the most important times in my recovery. It was such a beacon of hope.
TM: How important is mindset in overcoming such immense physical and mental challenges like this?
JR: Mindset is incredibly important. You never know what you can do until you’ve done it. It’s not the Sno-Cat that kills you — it’s the not fighting. The only power we have as human beings is the power of our perspective and our ability to change it. That’s a superpower that everyone possesses. You just have to harness it. Any time people get scared or hurt, they feel vulnerable, or they might fail — what’s the worst that can happen? Fail? Well, that’s the greatest thing that can happen. Your mistakes, your failures — those are your allies, those are your superpowers, that’s your fuel.
TM: Many would say overcoming these challenges makes you a stronger superhero; how do you feel this has impacted your acting?
JR: I always think about my daughter as the character or my mother who had to endure that terrible New Year’s Eve and nurse me back to health, change a diaper, and do all this stuff again. Those are the characters. Those are the characters that I took on that fueled me to get better. Because the better I got, the more that they would heal and the happier they would get. They would get so proud of all these little milestones that I would do — even the dumb ones, like getting in a wheelchair and not peeing in a jar anymore. My mom’s like, “Yes, I love that one!” My family, my poor nephew, who had to be there in the accident with me and watch me die — if you will. They were my characters. All of them, my whole family, everyone that I affected, my improvements, my progress, my health, my well-being, and each milestone is all for them because of them.
TM: What are the key steps you take today to improve your health and help you stay fit? What words of advice would you give to someone recovering from a serious injury?
JR: There are plenty of hardships in the recovery process, but to me, none of them were difficult. The only thing we have control over in our lives is our perception of things. The power of positive thought is key. When it came to my recovery, I could only have one thought: positive trajectory: forward. It’s the only way to go, which, for me, made it weirdly easy. I will be in recovery every day for the rest of my life, and I’m happy about that. It’s living in motion, living with purpose.
