Jeremy Renner Gets Tearful on ‘The View’ Over Daughter’s Reaction to His Deadly Snowplow Accident

Amanda Bell May 1, 2025, 12:37 pm

Jeremy Renner was a featured guest on Thursday’s (May 1) live episode of The View, and things got quite emotional as he discussed his hardwon recovery from a devastating snowplow accident that nearly cost him his life in 2023. The actor was especially wistful when he talked about how his now-13-year-old daughter reacted to his condition.

The Mayor of Kingstown star was choked up and tearful when he remembered trying to be her parent while he was still just trying to survive the catastrophic injuries he sustained, including 30 broken bones, after being crushed by the 14,000-pound vehicle.

Renner explained that after several surgeries and ICU stays he’d “forgotten about parenting” for a while until he was reminded by the presence of his child, Ava.

“When my daughter was in front of me, the clarity that came to me was unreal,” he remembered, with tears welling up in his eyes and Sunny Hostin rubbing his arm to comfort him. “I have to get better for her. I saw fear in my daughter’s eyes, and I worked so hard as a parent… to give her confidence, to not have fear in her life, And I’m the one that now gave it to her because of this incident. So it was my duty to work with her.”

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Renner said that he proceeded to include his daughter in his recovery process as a means of helping her heal, too. “I gave her tests to help her with this her own fear, like, ‘Look, I just have broken bones. It’s gonna be fine, but I need you to be my arms, my legs, if you could help me out. But if you wait for me, I promise you, if you wait for me, I’ll get better.’ Yeah, and here we are.”

He then remembered how Ava wrote an essay for his newly-released biography, My Next Breath: A Memoir, explaining, “So this essay she wrote about the most proud moment that she’s had. It’s me picking her up from school, and I was in a wheelchair the last she saw me the day before. But then I snuck out of the house, and I drove to go kick around because I needed a new milestone in my life for recovery, and I wanted to share it with my mom and my daughter.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Renner revealed that his reason for wanting to write the book, which is so titled as a nod to his survival tactic of trying to just breathe amid his crush injuries, as a tribute to the fact that his loved ones went through it all, too, in their own ways.

“I had to get out of my own way. It was important. It didn’t just happen to me, since it happened to my poor nephew, who I tried to save, who I can’t make him unsee those images,” he explained. “My poor mother, who received a phone call, 13-hour drive to get to me in the ICU in a coma. It happened to a lot of people… So I had to get out of my own way to share, help heal with them.”

Check out another touching moment from his appearance on The View in the clip below.

“Love is the only thing that you take with you.”@JeremyRenner opens up about what he remembers when he says he died after being crushed by a snowplow in 2023, which he details in his new memoir, ‘My Last Breath.’ pic.twitter.com/gASKqG9cb6

— The View (@TheView) May 1, 2025