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30th Apr 2025

Jeremy Renner explains what he saw when ‘he died’ after snowplow accident

Dan Seddon

His new memoir My Next Breath is out now

Hollywood actor Jeremy Renner experienced a “beautiful and fantastic energy” after being rolled over by a snowplow in 2023.

The horrific accident, which hospitalised the double Oscar-nominee for over two weeks, took place on New Year’s Day when Renner saved his nephew Alexander from being crushed by the vehicle (weighing over 14,300 pounds) outside his home near the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Renner suffered a total of 38 broken bones, as well as a collapsed lung and pierced liver, while he even believes that he left this mortal plane in the gnarly chaos.

He wrote in his new memoir My Next Breath: “Six f*****g wheels, 76 steel blades, 14,000 pounds of machine, all ranged against one human body. I hear all the bones crack… skull, jaw, cheekbones, molars: fibula, tibia, lungs, eye sockets, cranium, pelvis, ulna, legs, arms, skin, crack, snap, crack, squeeze.

Jeremy Renner attends the Mayor Of Kingstown special advanced screening event in NY on May 20, 2024 in New York City. (Santiago Felipe/Getty Images for Paramount+)

“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.

“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. I died, right there on the driveway to my house.”

Renner’s heart rate “bottomed out at 18”, meaning he was “basically dead”.

Elaborating on what his consciousness was going through at the time, the 54-year-old adds: “What I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy. 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.

“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.”