Jeremy Renner’s January 2023 accident took as much of a mental toll as it did physical, with the actor admitting it left him unsure about stepping back in front of the camera.

It was a difficult 2023 for Jeremy Renner in the wake of his life-threatening snowplow accident, but after a long and difficult recovery process, the veteran actor is back on screen for the third season of his hit drama Mayor of Kingstown. The road back wasn’t always clear for Renner, though, and he has even admitted that the prospect of getting back in front of the camera after the accident was a “terrifying” one for him to come to grips with.

A Terrifying Prospect
Renner sat down with Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes on the trios Smartless podcast, via The Guardian, and spoke about how unsure he was about returning to acting in the wake of the January 2023 accident. He admitted that the physical tole the accident took forced him to consider life away from the camera because of how exhausting the rehab process was proving to be.

“I just don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the fuel,” Renner told the podcast. “I have so much fuel to put into this reality, this body, all this stuff. I can’t just go play make-believe right now. Because that takes a lot of time to get right here every day just so I can have a positive thought, so I can progress, so I can always keep growing.”

He added that, while he has since returned to acting, he still faces physical and mental struggles and will continue to face those for the foreseeable future.

“I’m still trying to live in reality, I’m trying to live,” Renner said. “So it was a hard line for me to cross. It was a big stretch. It was very, very challenging for me mentally to get over that hump.”

The Accident
Jeremy Renner’s accident took place on January 1, 2023, at his family’s home in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, after what Renner said was a three- to four-day snow storm. Following the storm, he took out his snowcat to clear his driveway and dig the family’s cars out of the snowed-in driveway with the aid of Renner’s nephew.

The pair were reportedly freeing Renner’s pickup truck when the snowcat began rolling down the hill, toward Renner’s nephew. Renner attempted to stop the snowcat when he became stuck underneath it, suffering a litany of injuries as a result.

The actor ended up suffering from blunt force trauma to the chest and various orthopedic injuries that resulted in roughly 30 broken bones including eight broken ribs, a broken eye-socket, and a broken left tibia among many others. He underwent extensive surgery to repair some of the damage caused before and was hospitalized until his release on January 17.

Renner would begin his physical therapy that would last for roughly a year shortly after to regain his ability to walk