Last week, Jon Hamm revealed that Hawkeye actor Jeremy Renner broke both of his arms while filming scenes for their upcoming film, Tag. The story goes that Renner broke both of his arms on just the third day of production for the film.
Renner opened up to Entertainment Weekly to describe just how he broke his arms. Renner described a scene involving 20 to 30 chairs stacked on top of each other inside a community hall. The stack reached about 20 feet in height. Renner tries to run up the stack of chairs as he’s getting chased by Hamm and his other fellow co-stars Ed Helms, Hannibal Buress, and Jake Johnson. The set keeping the chairs stacked broke and Renner ended up breaking his arms, “I broke along with it and fell on the ground and broke my arms,” described Renner.
What’s even crazier is that Renner didn’t even realize his arms were broken. He got up and performed the stunt again. But he did eventually realize his arms were broken.
“Then I realized, I think something’s wrong, so I went to the hospital, and they said it was broken, so I got them wrapped up and then I went back to work and did everything I could do to continue on as we did.”
In fact, he describes how he returned to the set that day and filmed the same scene again.
“I went back to shoot that day, I didn’t take anything out of the cast and they had to put like a clean sleeve over my arm, because I didn’t want to take it off right after I just broke it, I needed it to set, I wanted the bone to set, so I think they had to CGI my arm or something in just that one scene, but the rest of it, you know, it all went on okay.”
He described how the broken arms limited his movement, “I couldn’t rotate my hands but I could move my arms up and down kind of like a robot, but I would do anything that didn’t hurt essentially.” In fact, he told Entertainment Weekly that he didn’t take any pain medication.
He then described how the injury affected his acting ability:
“The first week was a little rough just because of the swelling, but the swelling went down after the first week. I would take the splints off as often as I could so I didn’t stay in this sort of like arm bent position, stiffened, so I was working through therapy and all sorts of stuff throughout the whole picture but I just limited what I could do with my hand.”
As for how it affected filming Avengers 4, Renner explains:
“It’s sort of like a battle of my will to heal as fast as I possibly could, I did therapy just painfully everyday and I was able to get through it all as best as I could.”
He added:
“What else do you do, you just stop and cry and everyone go home? You know what I mean? I’d be like, ‘sorry guys, I’m not going to use a bow and arrow now in Avengers,’ it’s silly, so I have to kind of push through so that you can perform for everyone.”
Renner went on to describe that he filmed scenes for Avengers 4 with a bow and arrow in hand. It might have been painful, but it appears he gutted through it.
As for his hands now? They seem to have healed.
“I’m healed, I’m not at full strength, I haven’t been doing any training or anything, but I think I’ll probably get back and start actually doing something really physical.”
While Renner did film scenes for Avengers 4 already, it’s possible he might be called in to film reshoots now that he’s at full health. It’s been reported that Avengers 4 directors Joe and Anthony Russo will be doing reshoots for the film beginning sometime this summer and will last until September 1.
Avengers 4 is expected to hit theaters on May 3, 2019.