'Silver lining': Jeremy Renner reflects on his near-death experience and plots his future

New Year’s Day will be a strange time in actor Jeremy Renner's household. Two years ago, on January 1, the star of Hawkeye was involved in a horrific accident near his home in Reno, Nevada. In a moment of heroism, he stopped a six-tonne snowcat from sliding down the driveway towards his nephew but, as he attempted to regain control, got caught up and was crushed by the vehicle. Airlifted to hospital, Renner was ravaged. He broke 38 bones.

“The incident muted all the white noise in my life,” he tells The National, with a thoughtful tone that only comes with a near-death experience. “I think a lot of people have white noise in their life: things in the background that prevent you from doing the things you want to do. Things are kind of in the way… and a lot of things cleared up out of my way, because everyone’s on the same page.”

Renner calls it a “wonderful silver lining” and his positivity is inspiring. When we meet, he’s just come from his ‘in conversation’ event at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah. Dressed in a chic-looking pinstripe suit, he lowers himself gingerly into his seat, but otherwise you’d never know he’d been through multiple surgeries and intense rehab. Renner admits he’s struck by the audience's love for him in Saudi Arabia. “Makes it cathartic for me to share my story,” he says. “It seems to be a collectively shared experience at this point. There’s something kind of awesome about that.”

He is surprised by how well known he is in the Middle East. “It’s hard for anybody to quantify that, to understand it,” he says. “You don’t know. If you do a movie, it doesn’t mean we’re in the theatre watching with the audiences. It’s a very delayed response. I don’t know if people knew who I was over here. I had no clue. It’s beautiful to have people admire your work. So when it does happen, around the world, on my travels, it’s a lovely thing. So I’m pretty blessed.”

It does fit the Hollywood narrative that an actor who rose to global fame in Marvel movie The Avengers, playing the dead-eyed, arrow-firing Hawkeye, is something of a superhero in his own right. As he told chat-show host Jimmy Fallon, after his surgeries, “half my face is metal” and “all the right side of my back is metal”, but this isn’t a comic-book fantasy. Renner’s rehabilitation has been long and difficult. Everything from peptide injections to cold plunges have been explored. “Right now, my body requires a lot of time,” he says.

Gradually, the actor, 53, is going back to work. This year, he played a part in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third movie in Rian Johnson’s whodunnit saga starring Daniel Craig as the slick detective Benoit Blanc. “Yeah, that was awesome,” says Renner. “It’ll probably come out next fall, I think. I had so much fun with Johnson. A great cast.”

Joining the likes of Josh O’Connor, Josh Brolin and Glenn Close was a significant job for Renner. “I realised doing that movie that the last two jobs I’d done had been repeating characters between Hawkeye and [Paramount+ series] Mayor of Kingstown. So since 2017 I hadn’t played any other new character. It’s a long time to just be two characters. It’s a very big departure from any character I played before in this Knives Up movie. So it was great. It was great also that I didn’t have to carry the film. It was just a big ensemble. So that was a nice departure as well.”

As his recovery steps up, so does the workload. In January, Renner will start the fourth season of Mayor of Kingstown, the crime thriller in which he plays Michigan’s Mike McLusky. The character heads a powerful family and brokers an uneasy peace between gangs and law-enforcers. “I like the narrative, like the world, and we’re in the fourth season coming up now, in January,” he says. “We’ll probably end up doing... maybe we’ll do five. I don’t know. We’ll see how much energy I have, but we’re doing the whole fourth season and I’m excited about that.”

The show reunites him with its co-creator Taylor Sheridan, who previously directed Renner in the 2017 modern-day-western Wind River. “There are other ideas I’m working on with Taylor in that kind of world, maybe another type of show,” Renner hints, before putting some wish-fulfilment out into the ether. “Maybe I get something that works at home, and then I can actually work where I live for the first time in my career! That would be nice. We’ll see that if that does happen or doesn’t.”

His physical issues aside, Renner says he is “creatively limited” in what he can do, as he is focused on looking after Ava Berlin, his 11-year-old daughter with former wife Sonni Pacheco, the Canadian model. “I’m still a father number one,” he says. “That’s my best role to date. So I will always want to be with her and support my daughter.

It means he’ll never take a job that takes him too far from her. “I haven’t done that for almost 10 years,” he says. “I’ve worked somewhere in the US or where it’s in the summer and she can visit.”

Renner could return to the more character-based work he did in his early years before he became a staple of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – films like Oscar-winning military drama The Hurt Locker or Dahmer, where he played notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

“I’m certainly open to exploring new things,” he says. “I’ve got lots of time now at this point,” he then bursts out laughing. “Because, apparently, I can’t be killed.”