Jeremy Renner on the roles he avoids after a life-threatening accident

Jeremy Renner has made big changes in his life after surviving a near-fatal snow plowing accident last year.

The “Hawkeye” actor appeared on the “Smartless” podcast on Monday and told hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes that he now avoids certain “demanding” roles after breaking nearly 40 bones and nearly dying when his machinery ran over him.

Renner also said he was “very scared” of doing “damn fiction” when he returned to acting after his accident.

“I’m still trying to live in reality, I’m trying to live,” the “Mayor of Kingstown” actor said of his thought process as he went back to work. “It was a hard boundary for me… It was a big, big mental challenge for me to get over that hurdle.”

“And sometimes I still struggle with that,” Renner said. “I don’t take it super seriously. I’m playing a role that I can play very well, and I know the show very well, so it was easy for me to slip back into it,” he said of his current role in the television series “Kingstown.”

“But if it had been a very demanding role, I wouldn’t have taken it – I couldn’t have taken it,” he explained. “Not challenging in that sense – because the show is demanding – but if I had to play Dahmer or something like that, something that’s so far removed from me, I wouldn’t have the energy to do it. I don’t have the drive.”

“I have so much energy to put into this reality, into this body, into all this stuff – I can’t just pretend now,” said the 53-year-old. “Because it takes a lot of time to come here every day just so I can have a positive thought, so I can make progress, so I can keep growing.”

Renner recently spoke about what was going through his mind during his gruesome snow plow accident, which occurred near his home in Reno, Nevada, on January 1, 2023.

“I remember my head slamming into the thing and it just pressing down on me – it felt exactly like you would imagine,” he told Men’s Health in an interview published Tuesday. “An immovable object and a crushing force, and something has to give. But thank God my skull didn’t completely give. And then it just kept going. Waves, waves, waves, waves. The cheekbone broke, the eye socket broke, and then my eyes bulged out from the crushing I suffered from the machine.”

“I could see my left eyeball with my right eyeball,” he added, saying he was “gasping for air.”

In addition to breaking a total of 38 bones, Renner suffered a perforated liver and a collapsed lung. He had to undergo several surgeries and spent months recovering. He can now even talk about the “wonderful lessons” he learned from the experience.

“I could talk forever about what happened and the 45 minutes on the ice, but … there are so many great gifts,” he told Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” last month. “Being pushed to your limits. To your physical limits, to your mental limits, right? To your emotional limits.”

“It’s like I’m not going to have a bad day for the rest of my life,” he explained. “That’s impossible.”