There's some gruesome stuff in Jeremy Renner's first post-crash interview

Jeremy Renner gave his first serious TV interview since his near-fatal snowplow accident tonight, sitting down with ABC’s Diane Sawyer to reveal how the January 2 accident happened, the extent of his injuries, and what could have been his last words on earth: “Not today, motherfucker!”, as it happens.

Which was not, despite Renner’s apology to Sawyer for the profanity, the most graphic portion of the interview, by far: Renner, who’s candid about the horror of what happened, notes at one point that he could “see my eye with my other eye,” which is not, sans a mirror, how eyes are supposed to work. (One of the neighbors who helped Renner, in the aftermath of the 14,330-pound Sno-Cat running him over, said that, “his eye, it looked like it had been punched out.”)

Renner places the blame for the accident solely on himself, saying that it happened while he and his nephew Alex were trying to clear a car out of a snowbank. When the plow started to slip on the ice, Renner—concerned for his nephew—stuck a foot out of the Sno-Cat to get a better look, and then fell out of the vehicle. And then, when he tried to get back in and shut the plow down, he fell underneath it:

I just happened to be the dummy standing on the dang track a little bit, seeing if my nephew was there. You shouldn’t be outside the vehicle when you’re operating it, you know what I mean? It’s like driving a car with one foot out of the car. But it is what it was. And it’s my mistake, and I paid for it. That’s when I screamed, by the way, when I went under the thing. ”‘Not today, motherfucker!” is what I screamed. Sorry for the language.

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And, hey, here comes another grisly description of the aftermath, again from one of the helpful neighbors: “When I looked at his head, it appeared to me to be cracked wide open and I could see white. I don’t know if that was his skull, maybe just my imagination, but that is what I thought I saw.” (There are the same neighbors, Rich Kovach and Barb Fletcher, who reported that the noises Renner was making at this time were “the sound of someone that was dying.”)

Renner, of course, survived—although he did use sign language to tell his family “Sorry” for the pain he’d put them through, and wrote a possible farewell note for them before going into surgery. Sawyer lays out the full list of injuries: “Eight ribs broken in 14 places. Right knee, right ankle broken, left leg tibia broken, left ankle broken, right clavicle broken, right shoulder broken. Face, eye socket, jaw, mandible broken. Lung collapsed. Pierced from the rib bone, your liver — which sounds terrifying.”

Renner did his damnedest to put a positive spin on it all, saying that he views what happened as a result of his desire to keep his nephew safe, saying, “I have no regrets. I’d do it again, I refuse to have that be a trauma and be a negative experience. That is a man that I’m proud of, because I wouldn’t let that happen to my nephew. I shift the narrative of being victimized, or making a mistake, or anything else. I refuse to be fucking haunted by that memory that way.”

Renner is set to make a live appearance next week, for the premiere of his new Disney+ reality show Rennervations.

[via Variety]