Jeremy Renner reveals how he broke both arms while filming Tag

June 7th 2018, 9:16am

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Being an actor can be a dangerous gig, and actor Jeremy Renner learned that the hard way when he broke not one, but both his arms while filming his new movie TAG. As we’ve seen in the trailers the cast goes to great lengths to tag Renner, and the actor revealed that it was filming an escape scene that caused him to break his arms.

Renner was speaking to EW to promote TAG when he said that the accident happened when he was climbing 20-30 stacked chairs while trying to escape a community center. Then, after some rigging broke, the chairs went the way of Jenga.

“I broke along with it and fell on the ground and broke my arms,” Renner said, revealing he felt some pain but still tried the stunt again. “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. 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."

Renner continued and discussed how the first week was the hardest due to the swelling of his arms, and that working on the movie also meant working through some physical therapy. But once he got over that first-week hump it became much easier.

“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 they say in the entertainment biz, the show must go on, so the scene involving the chairs still had to be filmed. In order to do this, Jon Hamm said recently that Renner’s arms were created with CGI, causing much speculation as to what could've happened (extreme tagging?). But Renner cleared the air, saying CGI was only used in the one part during the chair climbing.

“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,”

Renner is a real trooper as this also meant he had to fight through some pain while doing his fancy bow work for AVENGERS 4. He said that he’s healed for the most part, but isn’t “at full strength”, and as uncomfortable as filming might have been, Renner said the worst part about the whole ordeal was not being able to pick up his daughter.