Jeremy Renner On The Roles He Avoids After Surviving Life-Threatening Accident

Jeremy Renner has made major changes in his life after surviving a nearly-fatal snow plow accident last year.

The “Hawkeye” actor appeared on the “Smartless” podcast on Monday, and told hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes that he now avoids certain “challenging” roles now after breaking nearly 40 bones and almost dying when his machinery ran over him.

Renner also said that he was “very terrified” to do “fucking fiction” when he returned to acting after his accident.

“I’m still trying to live in reality, I’m trying to live,” the “Mayor of Kingstown” actor said of his thought process when he was going back to work. “It was a hard line for me to cross… It was very, very challenging for me mentally to get over that hump.”

“And I still struggle with it sometimes,” Renner said. “I don’t take it super seriously. I’m in a character that I can do very well, and I know the show very well, so it was easy for me to kind of slide back into it,” he said of his current role on the “Kingstown” TV show.

“But if it was a very challenging role, I wouldn’t have ― I couldn’t have taken it,” he explained. “Not challenging in the sense that — because the show’s challenging ― but it’s that, if I had to go play Dahmer or something, something so far from me, I don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the fuel.”

“I have so much fuel to put into this reality, this body, all this stuff ― I can’t just go play make-believe right now,” the 53-year-old said. “Because it takes a lot of time to get right here every day just so I can have a positive thought, so I can progress, so I can always keep growing.”

Renner recently opened up about what was going through his mind during his gruesome snowplow accident, which occurred near his home