Anthony Mackie recently got candid and reflected on the Avengers star Jeremy Renner’s terrifying accident.
For the unversed, the 54-year-old Renner was in critical condition and could hardly move after a seven-tonne snowplough crushed him at his property near Reno on January 1, 2023.
A blizzard had hit the area near his mountain vacation home, so he got into the vehicle to clear the snow and tow his car from an icy road.
When the Hawkeye actor jumped out of the snowplough, he got trapped underneath and suffered serious chest injuries, including “a collapsed lung, a lacerated liver,” and over 30 broken bones.
Speaking to PEOPLE magazine, Mackie, who first worked with Renner in the 2008 movie The Hurt Locker before they both joined Marvel, shared that his friend “never looked at himself as a victim” after he almost died two years ago.
Recalling the incident, the 46-year-old actor quipped, “When I got the news, I was really surprised and just hurt that my friend was going through this. So the first thing I thought was, ‘I need to be by his side.’”
“Once he started getting back up and around, I would get progress reports from either him or his family once a week. And Renner’s funny. He’s here all broken up and all disheveled, and he is like, ‘Oh, I hate this s*****.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude,’” the Captain America: Brave New World star added.
He continued, “It was great to see him keep his spirits and the way he worked through it,” says Mackie. “He’s the pure definition of a strong human being. He never let himself get down. He never looked at himself as a victim.”
“It was really beautiful to see him work through that and become whole again. Now he’s a cyborg. He’s Cyborg Renner!” Mackie concluded with a joke.
It is significant to mention that months after the accident, Jeremy Renner needed a metal plate in his face to fix his partly collapsed eye socket and a rod in his leg to support broken bones.
