Jeremy Renner is the latest star to brush death. The “Hawkeye” actor was involved in a near-fatal snowplow accident in January, and has since kept his fans up to date as he recovers.
Leonardo DiCaprio has had several close calls in the past, including a skydiving accident where both of his parachutes did not work.
In 2021, Orlando Bloom took to Instagram to share a throwback picture after he fell three floors and shattered his spine.
Here’s a look at a few stars who have survived close calls.
JEREMY RENNER FEARED HE’D BE ‘SCIENCE EXPERIMENT’ AFTER ACCIDENT: ‘WHAT’S MY EXISTENCE GONNA BE LIKE?’
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeremy Renner and Orlando Bloom have all had near-death experiences. (Getty Images)
Jeremy Renner
The Marvel star was involved in a serious snowplow accident on New Year’s Day. He recently shared his “last words” to his family in a tell-all interview with Diane Sawyer.
“Don’t let me live in tubes on a machine,” he recalled writing in a note on his phone, “and if my existence is going to be on drugs and painkillers, just let me go now.”
He typed the note out because he could not speak after his chest and back were completely crushed by the snowplow, but he also remembered telling his family “I’m sorry” in sign language, “because I am sorry I did that to them, and it’s my responsibility. I feel bad my actions caused so much pain.”
Jeremy Renner shares hospital selfie after surgery following snowplow accident. (Jeremy Renner/ Instagram)
Renner’s interview aired Thursday, and featured a detailed explanation by Renner and his nephew, Alex Fries, on exactly how the accident happened.
Over the holidays, the actor’s family was visiting his home in Reno, Nevada when they decided to go skiing after a snowstorm. Renner manned the snowplow while his nephew assisted outside the machine.
The actor began to lose control of the snowplow, which he has driven countless times before, due to the slippery road from the ice.
Renner was injured in an area near Mt. Rose Highway, a road linking Lake Tahoe, which straddles the Nevada-California border, and south Reno. (Instagram)
Renner leaned out of the snowplow to check on his nephew. “I just happened to be the dummy standing on the dang track a little bit, seeing if my nephew is there,” he said. “Should be inside the vehicle when you’re operating it, it’s kind of like driving a car with your foot outside the car … it’s my mistake and I paid for it.”
He said that what happened next was a blur, but he fell out of the cab completely and then saw that the plow was rolling backwards on the ice towards his nephew, so he tried to climb back in the huge machine to stop it. In doing so, he stood on the tracks, which rolled and pushed him off. He then felt the tracks going over his feet, then his legs and on upwards to crush the rest of his body.
“That’s where I screamed, by the way,” he told Sawyer, “when I went under the thing, ‘Not today, motherf—er.’ That’s what I screamed, sorry for the language ….”
Jeremy Renner questioned what his body would look like after the accident. (Instagram/Jeremy Renner)
“I was awake through all of it, it’s exactly how you’d imagine it feels like … I was on asphalt and ice … it feels like someone took the wind out of you. Too many things are going on in the body to feel pain, it’s everything. It’s like if your soul could have pain.”
When the tracks of the snowplow reached his head, he said it pushed his eyeball out of its socket, recalling “I could see my eye with my other eye.”
Rich Kovach was Renner’s neighbor who ended up making the 911 call.
Jeremy Renner was bleeding heavily following the snowplow accident near his home in Lake Tahoe. (Emma McIntyre)
Because of the snowstorm, it took first responders just over 20 minutes to make it to Renner, and in that time, Kovach and his partner, Barb Fletcher, did what they could to keep the injured star alive.
Renner has been on the mend since the accident and kept his fans up to date on the recovery journey via social media.
He has done physical therapy and was recently spotted at an amusement park in a wheelchair.
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio has had several scares, according to the actor.
In 2016, the “Titanic” star opened up to Ellen DeGeneres about a skydiving experience where not one, but both of his parachutes did not work properly.
Leonardo DiCaprio had a scare skydiving when both of his parachutes did not immediately work. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Netflix)
“I jumped out of the airplane, and then my first chute didn’t open. It’s tandem, so somebody’s on your back. They cut that line. We started free-falling toward earth, and that’s when you get the, you know, 8×10 glossies of your whole life flashing before your eyes,” he said.
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DiCaprio explained the second parachute was tangled for “about 20–30 seconds” before the instructor could untangle it moments before landing.
“He untangled it, and then he told me, ‘Oh, you’re probably gonna break your legs now because we’re going too fast.” DiCaprio said it was “one of the worst experiences of my life,” before clarifying that he’ll never skydive again.
Also, during the interview with DeGeneres, DiCaprio explained that he was on a flight when the engine on his plane exploded.
“I was looking out the window, and the entire engine just turned into a fireball. I was the only person there who seemed to see this, but it was a flaming fireball…I kind of felt like I’d already died and gone to heaven ’cause no one said anything,” he explained.
He said he just began to scream. The plane ended up dumping fuel for 45 minutes before the pilots could perform an emergency landing, which caused all the tires to explode.
Orlando Bloom
“Pirates of the Caribbean” star Orlando Bloom suffered a near-fatal fall in 1998.
Bloom took to Instagram in 2021 to share a throwback image of himself a few days after the fall next to a present day picture of him cycling at the time.
Orlando Bloom shattered his spine in a three-story fall in 1998. (Paul Archuleta/WireImage)
“That’s me in my back brace circa 1998 about 3months after I fell 3floors and crushed my spine, narrowly escaping death and paralysis…” he captioned the post, adding, “grateful everyday for my limbs that allow me to push my limits and live life on my edge (safer now.)”
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In 2005, Bloom opened up about the three-story fall in an interview with GQ magazine.
“Until then, I didn’t have a healthy appreciation for life and death — that we’re not invincible,” he said of the 1998 fall. “And for four days, I faced the idea of living in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I went to some dark places in my mind. I realized, I’m either going to walk again or I’m not.”
He continued, “The doctor said he wasn’t sure how severe the spinal cord damage was. I remember him telling me that, and staring at the ceiling, thinking, I never stared at ceilings before! And I wonder if I’m going to be looking at ceilings for the rest of my life.”
Travis Barker
Travis Barker was in a plane crash that kept him out of the sky for years.
The Blink-182 drummer was a passenger on a private Learjet that crashed in South Carolina, which killed four of the six travelers on board in September 2008.
Travis Barker was on a fatal plane crash in 2008. (Getty Images)
According to the New York Post, Barker suffered third-degree burns on about 65 percent of his body and spent months in the hospital. Barker also needed 16 surgeries after the crash.
Barker’s friend Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein was the only other survivor of the crash. Goldstein died the following year from an accidental drug overdose.
Travis Barker flew again in 2021 with his now-wife Kourtney Kardashian. (Getty Images)
In his memoir “Can I Say,” Barker explained that the plane crash was the main reason he was able to quit his opioid addiction.
“People are always like, ‘Did you go to rehab?’” Barker told Men’s Health in 2015. “And I [say], ‘No, I was in a plane crash.’ That was my rehab. Lose three of your friends and almost die? That was my wake-up call. If I wasn’t in a crash, I would have probably never quit.”
Barker’s now-wife, Kourtney Kardashian, was able to get him back in the sky in 2021.
In August 2021, Barker took to Instagram and shared a picture kissing Kardashian in front of a private plane. “With you anything is possible,” he captioned to post, facing his fear of flying nearly 13 years later.
Zac Efron
A normal workout for Zac Efron could have taken a fatal turn in 2017.
Efron was a guest on “The Graham Norton Show” the same year where he explained that he joined Hugh Jackman on a workout one morning in London and was almost killed while riding a bike.
Zac Efron was involved in a bicycle accident in 2017. (Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for AT&T)
“I cycled with him in London, but I’m not one to ride a bike early in the morning in traffic, so it turned out to be quite dangerous,” he said. “I followed Hugh around a few cars and suddenly there was a double-decker bus right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, went under the front tire and narrowly missed death.”
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The “High School Musical” star explained that Jackman was not worried by the accident.
Zac Efron was with his “The Greatest Showman” co-star Hugh Jackman during the accident. Zendaya also starred in the film. (Don Arnold/WireImage)
“Hugh was on the other side of the road and stuck up his thumb and just said, ‘You good? Let’s go,'” Efron quipped.
Years earlier, in 2013, Efron shattered his jaw and had to have his mouth wired shut, according to Entertainment Tonight. Per the outlet, it happened after he reportedly slipped on a puddle.
“It sucks. I almost died, but we’re good,” he told the outlet in a 2021 interview of the accident.
Sharon Stone has said she’s had three near-death experiences one of which occurred when she was 14.
The “Basic Instinct” actress released her memoir, “The Beauty of Living Twice,” in 2021 where she detailed a clothing line incident that nearly decapitated her during her early teenage years.
Stone was riding a wild horse when the animal took off, cutting through her mother’s laundry line with her on the back.
Sharon Stone says she was nearly decapitated when she was 14. (Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
“It was bucking and rearing, snorting and spinning. I was fighting this b—- of a horse,” the memoir read, according to Insider.
Stone continued, “I didn’t realise we were heading for the wet sheets on the line until the line hit my neck and my feet slid through the stirrups. I couldn’t get out and I couldn’t get that dang horse to settle down.”
The actress wrote that her mother saw “her daughter being decapitated” and found “some kind of maternal strength” to free her from the horse.
Sharon Stone has had three near-death experiences in her life. (Photo by Unique Nicole/FilmMagic)
The horse took off, with Stone still on the back, until her mother was able to pull her leg and get her off the animal.
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Stone and her mother went to the hospital where a surgeon was able to “sew” her neck back up.
“He just looked at fourteen inches of meaty, torn-up kid neck and then looked at me,” Stone wrote. “My neck looked like I had a red, then pink, then white rope tied around it. That is how it healed.”
Sharon Stone has had plastic surgeries in the past to try and conceal the scar on her neck. (Getty Images)
Over the years, Stone has had several plastic surgery procedures to try and hide the scar on her neck, but over time, she has learned to accept it.
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“It looks okay now, and most people don’t seem to notice it,” she wrote. “I don’t care about it on most days, and once you survive things, over time, well … I personally feel proud of my scars.”