2023 started off on a very scary note for MCU vet Jeremy Renner, who was hospitalized with serious injuries following a snowplow accident at his home that left him with dozens of broken bones and other injuries. The actor has kept fans updated about his recovery process, and strenuous as it may have been, he’s already set to return to work filming for the third season of Mayor of Kingstown (available to stream with a Paramount+ subscription), and opened up about how he feels about it all during Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper’s New Year’s Eve CNN special.
Naturally, the conversation didn’t start off focused on Renner returning to the role of the hard-nosed Mike McLusky. Before that topic arose, Anderson Cooper addressed the fact that many people around the world dealt with life-altering situations throughout 2023, and asked what the actor tells people who inquire about how he made it through his own harrowing ordeal. In his words:
I think I’m just so blessed that I had so many things to live for. You know, I have a giant family. I have a 10-year-old daughter. I would have disappointed and really messed up a lot of people’s lives if I would have passed. And so there’s a lot for me to get better for. I’m also a pretty stubborn S.O.B., and there’s a lot for me to fight for. Recovery was just a one-way road in my mind, and my recovery became belief for me, because I knew I could give belief to my family, my daughter.
For all that Jeremy Renner jokingly called himself stubborn in that moment, that particular trait likely kept him going during the long months of recovery. Many others without the same overall sense of driving determinism likely wouldn’t have made it through all the rehabbing quite as fast as the Hawkeye star did. I mean, if I accidentally poke myself in the eye while brushing my hair, I’m thinking about calling in sick to work. (Not really, but still.)
I did get a teensy bit choked up when he brought up potentially being a disappointment to others had he not survived that frightening experience. Thankfully nobody has to worry about any of that, though.
After that emotional admission, Andy Cohen asked Jeremy Renner how excited he is to get back to the status quo of his day job with Mayor of Kingstown Season 3, and he confirmed production is starting up extremely soon, saying:
It’s been a really wonderful, wonderfully busy year, and I think I’m ready. I think I’m strong enough. We’ll see. I mean, I literally go back in a week. But I’ll be doing my best, trying my hardest.
Renner’s New Year’s Eve update comes roughly eight months after his first post-accident interview, and in the time between then and now, Renner was able to help write and record a full album of music that serves as a reflection on his already strenuous year. The album is set to release in the first month of the year, and he told Cohen and Cooper about how much it helped him cope with the situation to be able to put those feelings into music. As he put it:
Music has always been pretty cathartic and healing for me regardless anyway. This is more of a narrative of life and death and the recovery of all last year, so it’s more of a journal entry, so the music crosses a lot of different genres. It’s more cinematic in a lot of ways, I feel like. It wasn’t until the summer that we just started considering it. I wasn’t really strong enough to stand up to the microphone at that point. It was great. It was wonderfully healing, I think for even the people I wrote it with. who are all my friends. All of my recovery has been — the better I got, the better everybody else got. So the music became also a narrative of that.
In the days between Christmas and New Year's, the actor shared co-star Emma Laird's hype about returning to filming the Taylor Sheridan-produced streaming drama, and he also penned a sweet note to the first responders who were critical in ushering him to medical help on that fateful day.
Jeremy Renner’s new single “Weight” is getting a New Year’s release, with the full album Love and Titanium set to drop later in January 2024. Stream the first two seasons of Mayor of Kingstown on Paramount+ while waiting for more Season 3 updates.
