Jeremy Renner's Memoir Details Brutal Injuries, Near-Death Vision: 'I Hear All The Bones Crack'

Jeremy Renner is opening up in harrowing detail about the 2023 snowplow accident that nearly took his life. In his new memoir "My Next Breath," the 54-year-old actor says he's "sure" he died while lying on his driveway in freezing temperatures, waiting for help after being run over by his 14,000-pound snowcat.

When Renner stumbled and landed directly in the path of the machine, he was trying to stop his nephew Alex Fries from being crushed in it, the memoir states. He suffered from more than 30 fractured bones, as well as internal injuries, such as a severe loss of blood and a collapsed lung due to the incident.

"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. "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."

A Horrifying Soundtrack

The "Avengers" actor said he "died" in his mind while waiting nearly 45 minutes for paramedics. The following is from something he wrote: "I died, right there on the driveway to my house," he wrote. "Though I'd broken more than 30 bones and lost six quarts of blood (I'd find out the true extent of the injuries only later), an even greater danger to me as the minutes dragged by on the ice was hypothermia."

Emergency medical technicians who responded to a 911 call later told him his heart rate had plummeted to 18 beats a minute, leaving him "basically dead," he said.

Recalling the moment the snowplow ran over him, Renner wrote: "There came terrible crunching sounds as 14,000lb of galvanised steel machinery slowly, inexorably, monotonously, ground over my body. It was a horrifying soundtrack."

"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."

He said he had failed to apply the parking brake and disengage the tracks—an error that, as he described it, was "an innocent, critical, life-changing moment." That lapse led to a "monumental slip of the mind" and a chain of events that "would change the course of my life forever."

"My feet lost their grip on the moving tracks, and I never made it to the cab. I lurched violently forward, out of control. In that split second I was catapulted off the spinning metal tracks, arms flailing," Renner wrote. "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."

Visional Near Death and Restoration

Renner also described a spiritual experience during what he believes was a brush with death. "When I died, 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."

He added that in that moment, "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."

Renner said a force told him not to "let go," pulling him back from death and into survival. "I didn't f--king die. So the celebration of New Year becomes a recognition of the depth of the love in our family."

"My Next Breath" is out now from Flatiron Books.

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