SECOND ACT

HOW A NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE TRANSFORMED ACTOR JEREMY RENNER

- By Anjuly Mathai

I n the award-winning film The Hurt Locker (2008), Katherine Bigelow offers a stark look at the lives of American soldiers in Iraq. Two-time Oscar nominated actor Jeremy Renner plays Sergeant William James, an adrenaline-seeking bomb-defusing expert. He's that rare specimen of humanity that does not just flirt with death, but also seems to be actively courting it. In one scene, David Morse's Colonel Reed, seemingly amused at James' recklessness, says to him, “You're a wild man... you know that?”

Renner, 54, is not new to playing raw, rugged characters for whom death and danger are every day realities. Like in Dahmer (2002), the biopic of a brutal serial killer, or in The Town (2010), about four friends scheming to rob a bank. And then, of course, came Marvel’s The Avengers (2012), in which Renner played the hardened archer Clint Barton aka Hawkeye, which propelled him to new heights of fame. In one scene, when he comes back to himself after being brainwashed by Loki (Tom Hiddleston), he asks another member of the Avengers whether they know what it feels like to be unmade.

More than 10 years later, Renner would know what being unmade would feel like in a way he never would have imagined. On January 1, 2023, Jeremy Renner “died”. It happened after he was run over by a 14,000 pound snowcat—an industrial snow remover—outside his home in Lake Tahoe where he was celebrating New Year with his extended family. As he writes in his book, My Next Breath (which has become a