Jeremy Renner made a shocking confession, revealing that he felt briefly upset about being resuscitated after his near-fatal snowplow accident—having seen what he described as the calm tranquility of the afterlife.
The 54-year-old Marvel actor shared details about the traumatic event that occurred on New Year’s Day 2023, when he was crushed by a 14,000-pound snowcat outside his residence in Lake Tahoe while valiantly attempting to rescue his nephew.
In his recently published memoir My Next Breath, Renner describes the ‘electric serenity’ he felt during the brief moments he was clinically dead.
The experience, he writes, left him unafraid of death and filled with an overwhelming sense of peace.
During a recent interview on Kelly Ripa’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, Renner honestly acknowledged that his initial response to being revived was one of dissatisfaction.
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‘It’s a great relief is all I can say,’ Renner said of the feeling that came with his near-death experience. ‘It’s a wonderful, wonderful relief to be removed from your body. It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. It’s the highest adrenaline rush, but the peace that comes with it, it’s magnificent. It’s so magical.’
That sense of peace, he revealed, was so powerful that returning to life felt like a letdown.
‘And I didn’t want to come back,’ he said. ‘I remember, and I was brought back and I was so pissed off. I came back, I’m like, “Aww!”‘
Renner admitted he was only ‘gone’ for a few minutes after his New Year’s Day 2023 snowcat accident—but the glimpse of the afterlife was enough to change his entire outlook on life.
He said time didn’t exist in that space, describing the afterlife as a place of pure knowing, free from human limitations like language or linear thought.
‘That’s a human experience,’ he told Kelly. ‘Time is a human construct… This is so remedial—language, all these things. It’s all knowing, all experiencing, all at the same time, all at once.’
Renner now sees the accident as a wake-up call that cleared the noise and helped him identify what truly matters.
‘It makes me—a man that didn’t want to come back—really be able to be back here and live it on my terms as the captain of my own ship,’ he said. ‘And get on it or off it, I don’t give a f—.’
The brush with death also forced him to reevaluate where he places value.
‘I gave so much value to things that have zero value,’ he said. ‘So I invest into no stocks or bonds. I invest not into crypto or Bitcoin. I invest into love and my shared relationships that I experience love with. ‘Cause that is the only thing that you take with you.’
The podcast comes after Renner opened up about the ‘tiny but monumental’ mistake he made that caused the horror snowplow accident which almost killed him in his new memoir.
‘I didn’t engage the parking brake or disengage the steel tracks,’ Renner wrote.
‘In that moment — an innocent, critical, life-changing moment — that tiny but monumental slip of the mind would change the course of my life for ever.’
Renner was in the driver’s cab of his huge 14,000-pound snowcat when it occurred to him that his nephew was in harm’s way. He jumped out in an effort to save his life.
‘My feet lost their grip on the moving tracks, and I never made it to the cab. I lurched violently forward, out of control,’ he wrote.
‘In that split second I was catapulted off the spinning metal tracks, arms flailing. I arced over the front of the tracks, propelled forward, down on to the hard-packed ice, where my head hit the ground hard and instantly gashed open.
‘There came terrible crunching sounds as 14,000lb of galvanised steel machinery slowly, inexorably, monotonously, ground over my body. It was a horrifying soundtrack.’
Renner suffered 38 broken bones in the ordeal, as well as a collapsed lung and his liver was pierced by one of his broken ribs.
His nephew was able to render aid until emergency responders arrived to the scene. Renner was airlifted to hospital, where he was kept for more than two weeks and underwent multiple surgeries.
Despite all odds, Renner has returned to work on set, recently filming Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery – the third instalment of the Knives Out series.
