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In recent years, Jeremy Renner’s life has been more dramatic than anything he’s played on screen (including the Chitauri invasion of New York in The Avengers). Back in 2023, Renner was hospitalised in critical condition after an incident with a snowplow, with his life hanging in the balance. And while he survived, he’s been on a road to recovery in the years since. Now, he’s back on screens again, returning to his role of Mike Mclusky in Mayor Of Kingstownand joining Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Manwhich hits screens later this year.
It took Renner a while to get back to the idea of being in front of the camera once more. “It was kind of a struggle coming back to fiction, when my life is more non-fiction than non-fiction can really be,” he tells Empirespeaking in support of his book My Next Breath. “It’s, ‘Am I gonna walk right again?’, and how much brain-focus it takes to sit and stand and lie down. To exist requires so much of my mind, my attention, my focus, that to go back to work and say these lines on a page, that was bullshit. ‘What am I doing? I don’t think I’m ready for playing make-believe yet.’”
Roughly a year after the incident, though, he felt the need to return. “I got to a place physically where I thought, ‘I’m ready to go back. I want to get back to life, I have to be social, and also get people back in their jobs’,” he says. It wasn’t without its challenges. “I struggled the first couple of weeks, and had a lot of people help me on the show, because I did Mayor Of Kingstown Season 3. I did a stunt in the second week and we were all wondering, ‘What’s gonna happen?’ And it went great, and there was a big sigh of relief. It was pretty emotional.”
While his physical recovery has been remarkable, the biggest change in Renner’s working life comes in the form of a renewed focus on family. “The decision-making is, ‘I’ll never work again unless it’s with the people I want to work with, and my family can be there, or my daughter can be there, or my friends can be there’,” he explains. “I didn’t see any of my career, or my jobs, when I died. Nothing. Not one clip. It was all just the love experiences that I had. So I’ll continue to water that garden with the people I love. I took 15 family members last summer to shoot Knives Out in London, and I only did it because I could bring them all.” The more the merrier – welcome back, Jeremy.
Read Empire’s full Jeremy Renner interview in the Avatar: Fire And Ash issueon sale Thursday 31 July. Pre-order a copy online here. My Next Breath is available now in hardback, on Kindle, and audiobook.
