Jeremy Renner reflected on his 2023 near-fatal accident in his new memoir My Next Breath, revealing that he actually died after being crushed by a 14,000-pound snowplow.
“As I lay on the ice, my heart rate slowed, and right there, on that New Year’s Day, unknown to my daughter, my sisters, my friends, my father, my mother, I just got tired,” Renner, 54, wrote in the book, released Tuesday, April 29. “After about 30 minutes on the ice, of breathing manually for so long, an effort akin to doing 10 or 20 push-ups per minute for half an hour … that’s when I died.”
He added, “I died, right there on the driveway to my house.”
Renner broke over 30 bones in his body after being run over by a PistenBully snowplow at his Nevada home in January 2023, while attempting to save his nephew Alex Fries from being crushed by the same machine.
Related: Jeremy Renner Says His Eye Popped Out During Snowplow Accident: Details
A scary start to the year. Jeremy Renner was hospitalized on New Year’s Day after sustaining injuries while plowing snow in Nevada. The Mayor of Kingstown star, 51, was airlifted to the intensive care unit on Sunday, January 1, after “blunt chest trauma and orthopedic injuries” while driving a snowplow. According to the Washoe County […]
“Though I’d broken more than 30 bones and lost six quarts of blood (I’d find out the true extent of the injuries only later), an even greater danger to me as the minutes dragged by on the ice was hypothermia,” Renner wrote. The actor was laying on the ice for 45-minutes with his nephew and neighbors attending to his injuries before first responders arrived at the scene.
Renner noted that his nephew and neighbor watched as he turned “a gray-green color” before closing his eyes.
“I know I died — in fact, I’m sure of it,” he wrote, explaining that the EMTs said his “heart rate had bottomed out at 18.” This, Renner wrote, meant he was “basically dead.”
“When I died, what I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy,” Renner added. “There was no time, place, or space, and nothing to see, except a kind of electric, two-way vision made from strands of that inconceivable energy.”
Renner recalled feeling “an exhilarating peace” while lying on the ice.
“I could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once,” he wrote, in part, not knowing how much time had passed. “In death there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever.”
Renner eventually felt a force that told him not to “let go” — and pulled him back to life.
The Avengers star explained that the accident became “a glory moment” for him after surviving.
“I didn’t f***ing die,” he wrote. “So the celebration of New Year becomes a recognition of the depth of the love in our family.”
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