Jeremy Renner Says Daughter Had to ‘Grow Up Quickly’ After His Accident (Exclusive)

Jeremy Renner is back from the brink of death and determined to be better than ever. He sat down with “Extra’s” Billy Bush in NYC to talk about Season 3 of “Mayor of Kingstown” and his continued recovery from a freak snowplow accident 16 months ago.

Jeremy shared how the accident forced him and his daughter to “grow up pretty quickly.” He also spoke about how his ordeal overcoming death has connected him more to other people.

How is he doing today? Renner shared, “I'm feeling duct taped and put together,” adding that he used the show as a “platform to bounce back in a strong way” and that he had “nothing else to worry about besides recovery and then the show. Keep my life pretty simple.”

In the show, Renner runs a frigid Michigan town, but he actually filmed the episodes in Pennsylvania.

Billy said, “I bet you thought, ‘How am I going to get to Pittsburgh by January where it's freezing cold to do a really physical role.’”

He replied, “Yeah, there's that and really, to be honest, it was much more the, ‘I'm doing fiction.’ There's nothing fiction in my life. This is the real reality of trying to survive… There's no pretending… because I'm [in] real reality,”

That reality involved him asking, “Can I operate these legs again and breathe right? And all these things. That was so far gone for a minute, and then when it came time to, like, ‘Oh, it's been a year,’ like, I still didn't know. Do I have it in me?”

He went on, “It takes a lot to deal with pain and operate the body again. It takes a lot of brainpower and I just didn't have the energy… I just didn't have it. I would lose my gas in the first half hour, hour of the day. ‘How am I going to be on the set for 10 to 12 hours… and run the show and be on the show?’”

Jeremy shared, “I was really nervous. ‘Do I have the capacity to do it?’ So, I was always asking myself that, but I had a lot of people helping me… They really had to schedule me like a minor on a movie set, a certain amount of hours in a day, otherwise I’d start falling asleep. It was bad, but then I started getting stronger and stronger because they allowed me to have recovery time and then, here I am, we just wrapped it up on Friday and now I'm in much stronger shape. I've been able to train and got all these testosterone levels.”

Billy asked him what his work outs look like these days.

He answered, “Running's tough. I don't do it for working out. I do it for my joints and stuff. Up and down hills and things like that, but not for endurance. I can't do it for endurance. My joints aren't strong enough yet, however, I'll get there. I'll get to a point where I can. I push a lot of weight.”

Billy asked what it means to have a new lease on life and how has that manifested for him.

Renner explained, “To be honest, brother, I think everyone's in on it… I didn't do this solo, right?... What I've overcome is what I’ve overcome and that's fine, but it still took a collective of energy of everyone. This is everyone's story as much as it is mine and so I found, I feel more connected to people. I feel that they see me as the man that I am and not the famous guy, what I'm famous for.”

Bush asked Jeremy about his 11-year-old daughter Ava.

“Our relationship, we had to grow up pretty quickly from that and we endured it together,” Jeremy said. “She listened to my advice. She waited for me. I got better. She has a real reason for me to get better. The better I got physically, the less fear she [had]… because she was very scared being broken with 38 bones and all this stuff. I said, ‘Just watch. I'll get better every week.’”

Speaking of how hard it was for Ava to see him just after the accident, Jeremy continued, “You can imagine. That's why I'm saying just be patient and I'll get better… it's also for my mom and for my sister and my poor nephew had to hold my arm and see me the way I was. And the better I got, the more healing they could have as well, because it wasn't just me it happened to. Right? It happened to a lot of people.”

He shared, “Now, I'm a guy that's overcome death and there's something really cool about that, Billy. I tell you what, man, it really connects me to people more… I really like being with people. That allows access to me to actually really be with people and talk with people in a real way. Pretty cool, man. pretty dang cool, I got to say.”