Jeremy Renner Reveals How He Broke Both Arms on ‘Tag’

Jeremy Renner finally revealed how he broke both of his arms on the set of Tag while visiting The Tonight Show on Tuesday (June 12).

“The movie’s about a real group of guys that have played the game tag since they were 9 years old. They’re in their 50s now and they played it over these last 30 years and every year in the month of February it’s game on. They play,” explained Renner.

The actor said that the guys play an “extreme” form of tag that is almost “Jason Bourne-style.” His character Jerry has never been tagged and is described as “the king of the game.”

“There was this stunt on the second day of the movie where I was avoiding all of the guys,” began Renner. “So I do this stunt.”

“It’s a stack of chairs, like 20 feet high, and it’s supposed to fall over and I’m supposed to ride it down like a surfboard and then keep running,” he said. “So that happened a couple of times and it wasn’t quite good enough, so let’s do it again, but the hinge broke. Anyway, the stack of chairs was supposed to go and it didn’t go and I went.”

“It fell and I broke both, well I didn’t know I broke my arms. I just fell on the ground and I’m like, ‘That kind of hurt. Let’s do it again,'” he said. “I went up, did it again and it fell. I’m like, ‘Ah, OK. Whatever.'”

“I thought they kind of hurt. I figured I should go to the trailer, gotta rest for a minute,” he recalled after the injury. “I’m like, ‘Ah, I have to go to the hospital.’ They already swelled up.'” He was then told he had fractured both his radial and his wrist, leaving him with two broken arms.

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Renner revealed that he didn’t let his broken arms get in the way of filming. “I was like, ‘What do I do? What do I do now?’ Gotta go back to work. Finish the day,” he said. “I went back to work, and it’s a scene where I’m flinging donuts. One of my arms [is] broken. I couldn’t take the cast off, but I could take this little thing off and throw the donuts like this,” he said as he pretended to throw donuts by flicking his wrist.

After host Jimmy Fallon appeared shocked by Renner’s choice to keep filming, he said, “I had to keep going, man. Otherwise, I had Avengers to do after that. I had to heal fast.”

Renner then explained that they hid the cast by using CGI to cover his arm.

“Here’s the worst part of it. I just go to the bathroom and they’re like, ‘You OK?’ And this is all good, man. I can keep going. Let’s go. Let’s finish the day,” he said. “I go to the bathroom and they’re like, ‘Oh god. Jeremy’s not coming back. He’s not coming back.’ I got locked in the dang bathroom because it’s a round knob.”

“Somebody in production came and got me. Literally pants down around my ankles. I was like, ‘Thanks, now can we go finish the day?'” he said. “Humiliating.”

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