Jeremy Renner admits he was a “terrible patient” while recovering from his near-fatal snowplow accident.
The Avengers star, 54, recalled trying to break out of the hospital he was admitted to following the freak accident on January 1, 2023. Renner was crushed by a 14,000-pound snowplow at his home in Reno, Nevada, while trying to save his nephew Alex Fries from being run over by the machine.
“I can blame the drugs or not. No, I’m just a pain in the butt is what I was,” Renner admitted on the Tuesday, April 29, edition of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “I tried to break out many times. They handcuffed me to the bed because I kept trying to break out.”
Despite his best efforts, Renner didn’t get very far in his breakout attempts.
“Mind you, these are the slowest breakouts ever,” he shared with host Jimmy Fallon. “I never made it to the front door! I had my ass out. I had nine machines dragging at an epidural — all these machines, they’re all going off. It’s like, everyone knew what I was doing. But I was like, ‘Alex, you gotta pack up my stuff. We’re getting the hell out of here.’”
Renner is recalling his near brush with death in a new memoir, My Next Breath, which was published Tuesday. The Hawkeye star said he was initially reluctant to relive the events of his accident, but eventually came around to the idea.
Related: Jeremy Renner Says His Eye Popped Out During Snowplow Accident: Details
“I went through a year and I was doing pretty good. I was walking again. Then the idea of writing the book came around and I was like, ‘Oh, God, I got to relive this thing?’ It was quite the struggle,” Renner said.
“But I realized quickly, it was important for me to get out of my own damn way. To relive it, to recount it, to own it in a different way, word by word, was quite healing for me,” he continued. “But also, it didn’t just happen to me. It happened to my poor nephew, who was holding my arm and watching me bleed out and all that sort of stuff. It’s healing for him. And for my mother, who had to get that phone call and drive 13 hours through a snowstorm to get to me in the hospital. It was healing in a lot of different ways.”
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Related: Jeremy Renner: I Wrote My 'Last Words' to Family After Snowplow Accident
In the new book, Renner wrote how he briefly died during the incident.
“As I lay on the ice, my heart rate slowed, and right there, on that New Year’s Day, unknown to my daughter, my sisters, my friends, my father, my mother, I just got tired,” Renner wrote. “After about 30 minutes on the ice, of breathing manually for so long, an effort akin to doing 10 or 20 push-ups per minute for half an hour … that’s when I died.”
He added, “I died, right there on the driveway to my house.”
