Jeremy Renner made his first late-night appearance since his near-fatal snowplow accident in January.
Renner, 52, was a guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Monday night to promote his upcoming Disney+ series “Rennervations,” as well as to discuss the incident that left him hospitalized.
The actor was in good spirits as he walked onto the set with a cane and did a little dance as he sat down for the interview.
Kimmel, 55, introduced his guest as “indestructible” and an “Avenger who beat Thanos, Loki and a 14,000-pound snowplow.”
The late-night host jokingly asked if this was a publicity stunt, to which Renner joked in response: “Absolutely.”
“Now if there was any question as to who the toughest Avenger was, that’s settled now,” Kimmel said. “Forget [Robert] Downey [Jr.], forget [Chris] Hemsworth, forget these guys, it’s you, you’re the guy.”
Renner humbly responded, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“I think I speak for all of us when I say, thank God, look at you, you look great. We’re glad to see you here,” Kimmel concluded before discussing Renner’s accident.
Renner was critically injured in a snowplow incident on New Year’s Day and was hospitalized after “experiencing a weather-related accident while plowing snow” and suffering “extensive” injuries, breaking over 30 bones, in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
“I got lucky in a lot of ways. I’m happy to be here,” he told Kimmel.
The “Hawkeye” actor explained how he was lucky that the snowplow didn’t hit his vertebrae or any organs, and Kimmel pointed out that he suffered a collapsed lung.
“Yeah that’s fine, I have another one,” Renner quipped.
The “Avengers” star gave a shout-out to his mom and family — who were in the audience — and explained how he immediately started thinking about his family’s perspective of the accident the moment he was on the ground.
He revealed that he got kicked out of the first ICU he was in, which was under construction, so he was put in what he described as a “janitor’s closet” and said it was like a “haunted house.”
“I’m going back to this hospital this week to apologize to every one of those nurses,” Renner laughed.
Renner also shared a video that Paul Rudd sent him while he was in the hospital — in the form of a fake Cameo video.
Rudd, 54, made a fake Cameo as if Renner paid him to and acted as if he was some random fan, calling him “Jerry” and joking that one day maybe the two of them could meet.
The late-night appearance comes shortly after Renner’s first on-screen interview since the incident where he spoke to ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer.
The actor told Sawyer, 77, that he refuses to be “haunted” by the memory of the accident.
“I shifted the narrative of it being victimized or making a mistake or anything else,” Renner said in the hourlong special. “I refuse to be f – – king haunted by that memory that way.”
He also revealed in the interview that he was writing his “last words” to his family while in the hospital.
“I’m writing down notes on my phone. Last words to my family,” he shared, holding back tears.