Jeremy Renner has told of the ‘electric serenity’ he felt in the moments he was left clinically dead following his horrific 2023 snowplow accident.
The experience left him not only unafraid of death, but filled with a profound sense of peace.
Renner, who has starred in The Avengers franchise, shared the extraordinary revelations for the first time in his newly published memoir, My Next Breath, in which he relives the accident and its aftermath in stark and moving detail.
‘What came to me on that ice was an exhilarating peace, the most profound adrenaline rush, yet an entirely tranquil one at the same time: electric serenity,’ he wrote, recalling the moment he was lying dead in the cold.
‘I could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once. It could have been ten seconds; could have been for five minutes. Could have been forever. Who knows how long? In that death there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever.’
More than two years ago, Renner was crushed by a 14,300-lb snowcat outside his Lake Tahoe home on New Year’s Day. He was on life support for three days following the accident, and his family was unsure if he’d pull through.
The experience left him not just unafraid of death, but filled with a profound sense of peace in life
The accident left him with life-threatening injuries including 38 broken bones in his ribs, knee, ankles, pelvis, face and hands
He later admitted he forgot to engage the emergency brake on the monster vehicle after plowing his property. To his horror, it began careening towards his nephew, Alexander Fries, who was out helping him that day. Acting purely on instinct Renner attempted to jump back into the driver’s seat and get the snowcat under control.
Instead, he was pulled under its tank-like tracks, leaving him with life-threatening injuries including 38 broken bones in his ribs, knee, ankles, pelvis, face and hands.
The awful soundtrack of his bones crunching haunts him to this day. He also suffered a collapsed lung, pierced liver and major laceration in his head.
Renner writes that, as he laid on the ice for 45 minutes waiting for emergency vehicles to reach him, his pulse bottomed out at 18 beats per minute, by which stage, ‘you’re basically dead.’
‘I know I died – in fact, I’m sure of it,’ he continues in the book.
‘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…energy.’
He doesn’t call the place heaven or the afterlife, but he describes it as entirely beautiful; a place that pulses and floats.
‘All life was grand; all life just got better in death,’ he writes.
‘Everything and everyone I love or ever loved in my life was with me.’
But the actor – who is set to star in the new Knives Out movie this fall, his first film since the accident – also admits his deep sense of guilt over causing so much stress and pain to his loved ones.
He writes about the guilt he feels over his family who ‘saw me in the hospital, on life support for three days, a man who could die at any time’
