Jeremy Renner Was So Drugged Out He Hallucinated Convos With Jamie Foxx After Near-Fatal Accident

Jeremy Renner’s pain medication left him hallucinating a conversation with Jamie Foxx while recovering from his near-fatal accident.

In his newly released memoir My Next Breath, Renner opened up about the intense aftermath of his accident on New Year’s Day 2023, where he was run over by a 14,000-pound snowplow.

The 54-year-old actor recalled experiencing vivid hallucinations thanks to a “combination of opioids for pain and benzos” prescribed to him for pain and sleep, which left him having full conversations with his bedroom curtains and an imaginary Jamie Foxx.

“When the curtains didn’t respond, Jamie Foxx did. He was in my room quite a bit (he wasn’t),” wrote Renner, per Us Magazine. “We talked about this and that (I talked, he didn’t say much because he wasn’t really there); we went snowmobiling together (we didn’t — for a start, there’s no snow in Southern California).”

The Hurt Locker star also said hoped he could be “there for” Foxx, who at the time had stepped out of the limelight for an unspecified medical emergency, which he later revealed was a brain bleed that led to a stroke in April 2023. 

Renner also recalled how his family would dismiss the hallucinations as a side effect of the prescriptions, saying, “My mom or [sister] Kym or whoever was with me at the time would hear me chattering away and think, ‘Jeremy’s just tripping right now. Eventually I would fall asleep and someone would say, ‘Maybe we should dial back those meds — we don’t want to lose him.’”

Against the advice of his doctors, Renner eventually quit the medications cold turkey because he “hated” how they made him feel. 

“Now that I was out of the hospital, I just wanted to rush back into a sense of normal, a normal that didn’t involve chatting with curtains or an absent Jamie Foxx,” he recalled.

“I want to say that was the worst suffering of all, but it was just very different from anything else I went through,” Renner said elsewhere in the memoir. “For about 36 hours I was crying and shivering, uncontrollable tears, doing everything I could to just calm down.”

Though he occasionally resorted to “small doses” during his recovery, Renner added, “Once I got over the hump, it was all pretty much smooth sailing.”

Renner wrote that he broke more than 30 bones, lost six quarts of blood, and his EMTs determined his heart rate bottomed out at 18, rendering him “basically dead.”

“I know I died—in fact, I’m sure of it,” he wrote.

“When I died, what I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy,” Renner continued, describing the sensation as “an exhilarating peace.” “There was no time, place, or space, and nothing to see, except a kind of electric, two-way vision made from strands of that inconceivable energy.”

He added, “I could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once. In death, there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever.”

However, he claims that something urged him not to “let go” and returned to his body.

“I didn’t fucking die,” he wrote. “So the celebration of New Year becomes a recognition of the depth of the love in our family.”

In an interview with Complex last year, Renner recalled Robert Downey Jr. telling him after his accident: "Dude as long as you look good, who cares how you feel? I don't care if you're in pain. You look amazing."

My Next Breath is available now wherever books are sold.