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 earlier this week and told hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes that he now avoids certain “challenging” roles after breaking nearly 40 bones and nearly dying when his machinery ran over him.

He 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 thoughts as he returned to work.

“That was a hard limit for me. It was a big, big mental challenge for me to get over that hurdle.”

“And sometimes I still struggle with it,” he admitted. “I don’t take it too 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.”

Jeremy recently spoke about what was going through his mind during his gruesome snow plow accident that occurred near his home in Reno, Nevada on New Year’s Day last year.

“I remember my head hitting the thing and it just pressing down on me – it felt exactly like you would imagine it would,” he said in an interview with Men’s Health published Tuesday.

“An immobile object and a crushing force, and something has to give. But thank God my skull didn’t give completely. And then it kept going. Waves, waves, waves, waves. The cheekbone broke, the eye socket broke, and then my eyes bulged out from the crushing I had suffered at the hands of 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, Jeremy also 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.”