Jeremy Renner was “so high” on pain medication following his 2023, near-fatal snowplow accident that he was having conversations with an imaginary Jamie Foxx.
Renner, 54, recalled “chatting” with the curtains in his bedroom after taking a “combination of opioids for pain and benzos for sleep,” in his latest memoir, My Next Breath, released on Tuesday, April 29.
“When the curtains didn’t respond, Jamie Foxx did. He was in my room quite a bit (he wasn’t),” Renner wrote. “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).”
Renner also hoped that he was “there for” Foxx, who experienced his own medical issues later that same year. (Foxx experienced a brain bleed that led to a stroke in April 2023.)
Renner revealed in the book that he “died” after being run over by a 14,000-pound PistonBully snowplow at his Nevada home on New Year’s Day in 2023. The actor detailed the days he spent in a Nevada hospital before being transported home to Los Angeles via plane. While at home, Renner switched from intravenous pain management to pills — which is what led to his rather vivid visions.
Renner called the curtains in his bedroom “my buddies” and recalled talking about “anything and everything” with them. His family — for better or worse — was unbothered.
“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,’” he wrote. “Eventually I would fall asleep and someone would say, ‘Maybe we should dial back those meds — we don’t want to lose him.’”
Renner eventually went “cold turkey” off the medication, which was not recommended by his doctor.
“I hated how those meds made me feel,” he wrote. “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.”
Renner said he “suffered” physically and emotionally after stopping the pain medication and going through withdrawal.
“I want to say that was the worst suffering of all, but it was just very different from anything else I went through,” he wrote. “For about 36 hours I was crying and shivering, uncontrollable tears, doing everything I could to just calm down.”
Occasionally, Renner admitted, he would take a “small dose” of the medicine.
“Once I got over the hump, it was all pretty much smooth sailing,” he added.
