Jeremy Renner’s road to recovery prompted a partial reassembling of The Avengers.
Last month, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans made an under-the-radar trip to Los Angeles to visit Renner, who was involved in a near-fatal accident on Jan. 1 when he was crushed by a 7-ton snowcat. The “Hawkeye” actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered orthopedic injuries and blunt chest trauma while trying to reach his nephew who was stuck in a snowdrift.
“I was honestly so fucking happy to see him. I didn’t know if I was ever going to see him again,” Johansson tells Variety in a cover story about her 30-year career that includes eight Marvel movies, several of them alongside Renner. “To not only see him again but to see him thriving and in such an amazing space, mentally. He’s a very spiritual person in general and a very soulful person. And you can see that in his work. It comes through. He has such a depth to him. And I just was so happy to see that he is full of life and light, and he’s also hilarious. We laughed a lot.”
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Evans, who first began working Johansson when she was a teen in the heist film “The Perfect Score,” offers some details of what happened when the three gathered for a reunion, which wasn’t publicized. “No tears at all. A lot of laughs and smiles and hugs,” Evans says. “Leave it to Jeremy to take something this potentially tragic and turn it into something so inspiring.”
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On the day of the accident, Johansson was shooting the upcoming Apple movie “Project Artemis” opposite Channing Tatum when she woke up to the news that her “Avengers” co-star Renner was nearly killed in a snowplow accident in Tahoe while digging out his nephew’s car.
“I was very upset,” she remembers. But as Renner’s prognosis quickly improved, she and her fellow Avengers began joking with their convalescing cohort. “On the Avengers text chain, we’re like, ‘OK, you beat us all. That’s it. You won,’” she says. (The text thread includes the original six Avengers — Johansson, Evans, Renner, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo.) “That’s like real superhero stuff. It’s unbelievable.”
Renner’s recovery has progressed so dramatically that he was able to celebrate the recent premiere of his Disney+ series “Rennervations” in person. He also recently posted an Instagram video of him exercising and taking “the new parts for a tiny test drive.”
Click here to read Variety’s full cover story with Johansson, who stars in the Cannes-bound Wes Anderson film “Asteroid City.”