Off The Record

Jeremy Renner Certain Death Isn’t Final After Haunting Snowplow Experience

Published on May 1, 2025

The ‘electric tranquility’ that Jeremy Renner experienced after his terrible 2023 snowplow accident has been described.

In addition to making him fearless of dying, the experience gave him a deep sense of tranquility.

In his recently released memoir, My Next Breath, Renner—who has starred in The Avengers franchise—recounts the tragedy and its aftermath in vivid and poignant detail, revealing the shocking facts for the first time.

“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.”

A 14,300-pound snowcat crushed Renner outside his Lake Tahoe house on New Year’s Day more than two years ago. After the accident, he spent three days on life support, and his family wasn’t sure if he would survive.

After he plowed his land, he later acknowledged that he had forgotten to use the monstrous vehicle’s emergency brake. To his dismay, it started hurtling in the direction of Alexander Fries, his nephew, who was out that day assisting him. Renner tried to get the snowcat under control by jumping back into the driver’s seat out of pure instinct.

He suffered life-threatening injuries instead, including 38 fractured bones in his ribs, knee, ankles, pelvis, face, and hands after being dragged beneath its tank-like tracks.

He is still haunted by the terrible sound of his bones cracking. He also sustained a severe cut to his skull, a perforated liver, and a collapsed lung.

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 describes the location as completely gorgeous, a place that pulsates and floats, but he doesn’t refer to it as heaven or the afterlife.

“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.”

However, the actor also acknowledges his intense sense of remorse about causing his loved ones so much stress and anguish. He will be starring in his first picture since the accident, Knives Out, this fall.

“Yes, it was an “accident”,” he writes, “but whatever I call it, I’m still aware I caused it.”

“It wasn’t on purpose, and I don’t think it was reckless, but I have to live with not applying the hand brake on the Snowcat.”

“I know what I did to Alex,” he adds. “I’m deeply conscious of what I did to my family… I caused this heartache; it was entirely my responsibility.”

“I had put all that fear and terror onto Alex, who had to hold my arm for 45 minutes and look at his uncle bleed out on the ice. That poor kid will never be the same because of me; he can’t unsee that.”

“Neither could any of my family who saw me in the hospital, on life support for three days, a man who could die at any time.”

“My daughter had to retreat to videos of us, deep in a kind of childlike sorrow for which she had no words.”

For the benefit of his family, Renner made it his goal to recover, and he has recovered quite well. When he returned to the set of Mayor of Kingstown in January 2024, a year after the accident, he even performed some of his own stunts.

Renner was determined not to allow the accident stop him from getting back behind the wheel that same year, even though it would have been reasonable if he had never wanted to see a snowcat again.

“Climbing back up into the cab was fine; firing it up was fine; simply moving it from one point to another was fine because I knew how to work it,” he recalls.

“What was a bit unsettling, though, was jumping down off the Snowcat and finding small pieces of my clothing still stuck in the tracks. There was part of my hat; there were strips of my clothes.”

That may have been a horrifying sight to some. Renner, meanwhile, was merely astounded by the incredible fortitude of bone and flesh.

“My body could actually survive after being dragged under and crushed by this machine,” he writes. ‘Standing once again on the tracks – the STOP button firmly pressed, the hand brake firmly applied – I thought, “Human body’s an impressive piece of biology, man.”‘

But there is one painful wound that never goes away.

“My mouth is a disaster,” he writes, “It’s an absolute nightmare in there, my own private hell.”

“Every time I’m talking, or eating, or sleeping, I want to scream inside because of the chaos in my mouth. My teeth will never line up properly again; one side got pushed so far offline by the Snowcat and it’s unfixable.”

However, he claims that even that suffering is tolerable and that he is simply thankful to be alive.

“I refuse to give these private agonies too much energy because they really don’t have that much value. There are so many other things to focus on.”

“I got burnt yesterday out in the LA sun,” he adds. “It was the best day. I’m grateful for sunburn now. Imagine that.”

Additionally, he no longer fears death because he has firsthand experience with it; in fact, he now looks forward to it.

“I knew then, as I know now to this day and will always know: Death is not something to be afraid of… death is something to look forward to, a return to that electric serenity outside of time.”

“It is not dark, not the end, not a disaster,” he continued, “it is magnificent, and exhilarating; it is your soul, and your love, concentrated in their purest forms.”

“Dying, you become connected to the collective energy everywhere all at once, which is itself a kind of divinity.”

He describes death as a ‘fierce teacher’ that taught him what a waste of time it is to feel negative emotions like hatred or fear.

“Love slowly, quietly, and patiently waits for hate to simply burn out,” he writes. “It requires so much more energy to hate than to love, and love has all the time in the world.”

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