Robert Downey Jr discusses Jeremy Renner’s “mind-blowing” recovery following health scare
When Chris Evans married Alba Baptista last September, there was no doubt a great deal of love in the air as family and friends, including his Marvel co-stars, all gathered around to celebrate the happy couple. One person who seemed to steal the show during the evening for all the right reasons was Jeremy Renner, who was up on his feet and celebrating despite suffering life-threatening injuries at the start of the year.
Renner was hospitalised in January 2023 with blunt chest trauma and orthopaedic injuries. His Sno-Cat – a large snow plough weighing about 14,330 pounds – ran him over, leaving the actor with injuries that could have proven fatal if not dealt with correctly. Renner was trying to help his nephew out of the snow when he was injured in Lake Tahoe. He broke his right knee, ankle, clavicle and shoulder, his left tibia and ankle, and his ribs in 14 places.
Robert Downey Jr described seeing Renner looking fit and healthy at Evans’s wedding as “mind-blowing,” a sentiment that was shared by many of his Marvel co-stars who spoke about Renner in Chris Hemsworth’s cover for Vanity Fair.
“He sent us all a sort of doped out, hospital, beat-up image and said, ‘All good, guys’. And then I didn’t hear from him for a while as he was in the thick of it,” Hemsworth said in Vanity Fair.
Downey added, “If there’s one characteristic we’d all agree is paramount, it’s resilience,” he said, “To see Renner embody that literally, and in the context of what was basically a Portuguese American wedding, was mind-blowing. Fully recovered and ready to celebrate. So, yes, miracles happen.”
Renner has scattered memories of the incident and his recovery but does recall that the first person he saw at his bedside was fellow Marvel co-star Anthony Mackie. The two go way back to when they starred in The Hurt Locker together long before the Marvel days. “One of the first people at my hospital bed was Anthony Mackie. He was in Vegas, he shot over and he’s the first person I saw when I woke up.”
Renner continued, “We don’t talk all the time. We’re not, like, hanging out all the time, because the problem with having, you know, actor friends, everyone’s so busy and now we’re all parents and we never see each other,” he said, “We rarely talk to each other, but the connectedness that we have is an always thing.”
The actor is truly on the road to making a full recovery. Renner recently posted a video on social media which showed he could run uphill for the first time since the accident and has announced that he will be coming back for another Paramount+ series of Mayor of Kingstown. He has also revealed that he wants to return to Marvel as Hawkeye and is on the right track to doing so.
“[I’m doing] probably 90 percent of all the things I needed to be doing … I think another six months will be hopefully running [more] … I got to set goals for myself. I’ll do whatever I can … whatever it takes to get better, to get stronger.”
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