‘Avengers’ Actor Jeremy Renner Says He Briefly Died After Snowplow Accident

Jeremy Renner recently went into detail about his near-fatal snowplow accident in 2023 while promoting the release of his new memoir, “My Next Breath.”

The 54-year-old “Avengers” star said he believes he died briefly following the accident and felt nothing but “peace” in those moments.

“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 the book. “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 could see my lifetime. I could see everything all at once,” he said in part during an interview with US Weekly, noting how his heart rate bottomed out at 18 BPM. 

“In death there was no time, no time at all, yet it was also all time and forever,” Renner said, noting how he experienced “exhilarating peace” and a “constantly connected, beautiful, and fantastic energy.” The actor said 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.” 

The actor said he returned to his body after feeling a force telling him not to “let go.”

Renner broke more than 30 bones after being run over by a 14,000-pound snowplow at his Nevada home in January 2023 while trying to save his nephew, who was in the machine’s path.

“Writing about it has been very emotionally cathartic to have to go word by word through it all again,” Renner told People during a recent interview. “I don’t not talk about it. It’s part of my life every day, and it’s always a wonderful reminder of the strength of the human spirit and how fragile the body is and how badass it is at recovery.”

“I’m not haunted by the incident — not too often anyway — by the images, the sounds,” he added. “But I am reminded of my new reality, and it’s wonderfully positive. I didn’t die.”

Renner’s memoir was released on April 29.