Jeremy Renner… one of the baddest dudes in the business.
Of course, most of us know him from movies like The Town or Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, but I actually really enjoy him in the Taylor Sheridan series, Mayor Of Kingstown. He’s been in a ton of other movies as well, but more recently, his claim to fame has been surviving an absolute nightmare scenario that probably would’ve killed a lesser man.
If you’re not familiar, Jeremy Renner was involved in a horrific Snowcat accident where in an effort save his nephew, he wound up getting run over by the 14,000 pound machine near his Lake Tahoe home. Today, he released a new memoir detailing the gruesome accident, titled and I can try and give you a brief rundown of his injuries, which included 38 broken bones, a collapsed lung and lacerated liver, but it probably won’t do it any justice.
On the Joe Rogan Experience podcast today, he described it as “drowning, getting struck by lightning and bleeding out all at once,” but according to his book, his injuries were as follows:
“I knew that my skull was split like a watermelon, my brain pulverized like meat. Skull, jaw, cheekbones, molars; fibula, tibia, lungs, eye sockets, cranium, pelvis, ulna, legs, arms, skin; crack, snap, crack, squeeze, crack. More sounds: a ringing in the ears, as if a gun had unloaded next to my head. A sting of bright white in my eyes – I was blinded by a coruscating lightning, a lightning that signals the break of my orbital bone, causing my left eyeball to violently burst out of my skull.”
I mean… how does anyone survive that?
And what I can’t even begin to fathom is how the first EMS person on the scene has to try and sort through this pile of crushed bone and blood, eyeballs falling our of his face, barely even breathing if at all, and then come up with a plan of attack in seconds to save his life. Meanwhile, I write stupid blogs like this for a living… existential crisis aside, it’s truly remarkable that people are capable of that kind of heroism.
Renner said that he continued to fight to try and breathe, knowing that he’d surely die if he stopped breathing. Luckily, no vital organs were severely damaged, his spine was spared, his brain was spared… he might be 20% titanium, but it’s truly a miracle.
And despite all of that… he says getting the screws out of his skull and the painkillers were worse than being run over. He took a militant approach to rehab and recovery, because the alternative was to just waste away on pain meds:
“Nobody’s gonna do it for you, but what else are you gonna do? You gonna take pills? That was one of the harder things, again worse than the accident as well, is getting off OxyContin. And I got off pretty quickly. That’s gnarly stuff, man. I’m glad it was there the pain for me, but I wanted to get off it as soon as possible because it’s highly, highly addictive. And coming off that stuff was gnarly.
Ironically I was supposed to be doing a movie about the Sackler Family… it was supposed to happen that spring, obviously that got canceled because I had to take OxyContin to get by, but I had to get off that stuff really quick. It was really interesting how people treat the drug… everyone was monitoring, counting the pills, they treat me like I’m some kind of drug addict and I don’t want the stuff. Jesus Christ, it’s terrible.
I don’t ever blame the drug, sort of how it’s free to use and it’s even supported in the school system, that family got away with a lot of stuff to promote it.”
Joe Rogan followed up by saying:
“To put it lightly… that’s an evil family.”
Just a wild, wild encounter and miraculous recovery… like I said earlier, it would’ve killed a lesser man. But the warning about painkillers are serious ones, and this is coming from someone who presumably has limited experience with it.
It’s no secret the opioid epidemic has had devastating consequences in America. In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma aggressively promoted prescription opioids like OxyContin as safe and non-addictive. This led to widespread over-prescription and misuse, with many patients developing serious dependencies. As prescriptions became harder to obtain, a wave of heroin use (which is essentially the same thing) followed in the 2000s, and by the 2010s, the crisis was fueled by fentanyl — a synthetic opioid far more potent and deadly than heroin.
The epidemic has caused over a million overdose deaths, strained public health systems, and cost the U.S. economy over a trillion dollars annually. The Trump administration has made a serious effort to stop the flow of fentanyl coming across our borders, even making it a central part of tariff negotiations with Mexico and Canada, but it’s just the beginning of combating this awful problem.
Here’s the full episode… well worth the listen:
