Mayor of Kingstown Crew was unsure what condition Jeremy Renner would be in after the accident

When Jeremy Renner returned to work a year after his near-fatal snow plowing accident, he was understandably nervous.

The Mayor of Kingstown The 53-year-old star faced a daunting task when filming on the Paramount+ show’s third season resumed in January, and he tells PEOPLE he had to learn to be “okay” with failure when he returned to the job.

“In the beginning, I don’t think I had seen anyone – and these are all people I’d worked with for two seasons – so I didn’t really have a chance to talk to anyone,” Renner says. “They didn’t know which version of Jeremy was coming back. I wasn’t in a really good place, to be honest. I really wasn’t.”

After being hit by a snow blower, Renner broke more than 30 bones and underwent multiple surgeries. He spent most of 2023 in physical therapy, relearning how to walk and eventually run.

“Nothing will be normal or like it was before the accident,” he says. “That’s fine with me. I accept it.”

While he previously told PEOPLE he was “nervous” to return to the set, he can now say he is grateful for the way his colleagues Mayor of Kingstown Colleagues took care of his return home.

“I had to be handled with kid gloves, actually. I had to lean on people physically and emotionally, and they took care of me,” he admits. “I did my best to take care of them and get through the show as best I could, and we worked together and got it done.”

In an exclusive Paramount+ featurette we showed PEOPLE, Renner reveals that he was actually able to do his own stunts in season three—a feat that surprised even him.

“I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but in the first episode we were surprised. No injuries,” he recalls, also noting that the stunts were “pretty brutal.”

And even when he puts his professional life aside, Renner is determined to get better every day. He says he relies on the “power of perspective” to stay motivated.

“It’s pretty haunting. I could look at this as a really horrible accident and a horrible situation, and a lot of things changed, and I ruined my family’s life and left my daughter scarred,” he says, referring to his only child, 11-year-old Ava. “I can look at things really, really negatively, or not.”

Although the actor chooses to remain positive, he ironically admits that he is not an “optimistic person” by nature.

“I’m not the annoying, super-optimistic person that you go on vacation with and say, ‘Dude, relax,'” he says, laughing. “I’m more of a realist, but reality is beautiful from my point of view.”

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Season 3 of Mayor of Kingstown Premieres June 2 on Paramount+.