Jeremy Renner Recalls Anthony Mackie's Hospital Visit After Snowplow Accident: 'First Person I Saw'
Jeremy Renner said he and 'Hurt Locker' costars Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty still have a close bond
Jeremy Renner is recalling how Anthony Mackie rushed to his side in the days following his snowplow accident.
As Renner, 53, relived the experience with James Corden on SiriusXM's This Life of Mine with James Corden, he shared how thankful he is for his Avengers and The Hurt Locker costar Mackie, 45.
"One of the first people at my hospital bed was Anthony Mackie. This accident. He was in Vegas," Renner recalled. "He shot over, and he's the first person I saw when I woke up."
"And we don't talk all the time," he added. "We're not, like, hanging out all the time, because the problem with having, you know, actor friends, everyone's so busy and now we're all parents and we never see each other. We rarely talk to each other, but the connectedness that we have is an always thing."
Renner and Mackie worked together on 2008's The Hurt Locker, in which they portrayed soldiers during the Iraq War. The pair later appeared in multiple Avengers movies together.
During Renner's interview with Corden, he also noted that the two share a close bond with actor Brian Geraghty, who played the third soldier on the bomb-defusing squad that Hurt Locker's storyline followed. The movie, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
"They've affected my life in unexpected ways," Renner shared of his friendship with Mackie and Geraghty, 48. "We should have just been guys working together or whatever, and it's become far beyond that."
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The actor noted that he was with Mackie and Geraghty "all the time, on and off camera" while they filmed Hurt Locker in Jordan in 2007.
"Having that shared experience with somebody, that was so life-changing," he added. "It just cements or anchors one of the very principles that I desire in life is a shared experience with a human."
Related: Jeremy Renner Says Work on New Season of Mayor of Kingstown Is 'Arduous' but Exciting (Exclusive)
Renner previously shared that Mackie "was there at my bedside" in the initial aftermath of the Jan. 1, 2023, snowplow accident in his interview with Diane Sawyer back in April.
Now more than a year removed from the near-death experience, the actor is getting back to work on his Paramount+ series Mayor of Kingstown and even released an album titled Love and Titanium, inspired by the last year of his life.
“I don't know if I'm looking forward to it," he recently told PEOPLE of returning to acting on Mayor of Kingstown. "Again, I try to just do everything kind of step by step here. That's one foot in front of the other one. Then you're walking."
New episodes of SiriusXM’s This Life of Mine with James Corden air Thursdays on Stars (ch. 109) and on the SiriusXM app.
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