Jeremy Renner made a serious comeback after he was almost crushed to death by a snowplow two years ago. In his new memoir, My Next Breath, the Marvel actor looks back on the Jan. 1, 2023 accident.
“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 wrote in his book, per Us Weekly. “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.”
The actor goes on to enumerate the bones he broke after being run over by his own 14,000-pound snowplow at his home in Reno, Nevada, as he was trying to save his nephew, Alex Fries from the same fate.
“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 penned.
The 54-year-old was laid out on the ice for 45 minutes before first responders arrived. His nephew and neighbors watched as his skin became a “gray-green color.”
“I know I died—in fact, I’m sure of it,” he wrote. He revealed that EMTs said his “heart rate had bottomed out at 18,” which meant he was “basically dead.”
“When I died, what I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy,” Renner continued. “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.”
He described it as “an exhilarating peace.” He added, “I could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once. In death, there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever.”
He revealed that something urged him not to “let go” and he came back into his body.
“I didn’t fucking die,” he wrote. “So the celebration of New Year becomes a recognition of the depth of the love in our family.”
Renner has since returned to acting, resuming his role in Paramount+’s Mayor of Kingstown, appearing in Disney+’s Marvel miniseries Echo, and acting in the upcoming third installment of the Knives Out film series, Wake Up Dead Man.
My Next Breath arrives on Tuesday (April 29).