In his new memoir, Oscar-nominated actor Jeremy Renner shares a detailed and harrowing account of the New Year’s Day 2023 accident at his property in Reno, Nevada, when he was crushed by a running Snowcat while saving his nephew from being pinned and likely killed by the tracked snow removal vehicle. In the book, out this week, several new details about what happened that day and throughout his recovery are revealed for the first time.
In unembellished and blistering prose, My Next Breath sees the actor best known for The Hurt Locker and his portrayal of Hawkeye in the Avengers franchise share his horrifying experience and details his emotional and physical recovery after being run over by the 14,300-pound vehicle, which is mostly used at ski resorts. That day, the actor broke 38 bones and had to have his eye duct-taped back in after the accident, which occurred after a massive storm hit Reno as Renner had gathered his extended family for a New Year’s weekend ski vacation.
Renner became the second most Googled person of 2023 as he continued a remarkable recovery after his truly terrifying accident. He’s previously shared his account of the accident that nearly killed him with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer, but in his book, the actor provides several fascinating new details about the incident and his endurance that captures the human capacity for hope and how he leaned on his beloved family came together throughout his miraculous recovery. Here’s a look at some of what the actor shares in the riveting book.
Renner believes he died briefly after his accident
After his harrowing account of the Snowcat accident, which crushed his body and put him in an intensive care unit, Renner writes that he died while lying out on his freezing cold driveway as his nephew desperately ran off seeking help. The actor explains his experience that day in somewhat mystical detail, ultimately sharing with readers that after the experience, he has no fear of death.
“After about 30 minutes on the ice, 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,” the Avengers star wrote. “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.”
The actor waited 45 minutes on the ice before emergency first responders arrived. At that time, he said that his neighbor and nephew saw his skin turn a blue-green color; his heart rate bottomed out at 18, an EMT told him, he writes in the book. Renner describes death as “an exhilarating peace,” but eventually, a force he felt told him not to let go.
“I didn’t fucking die,” he writes in his memoir. “So the celebration of New Year becomes a recognition of the depth of the love in our family.”
Renner survived by relying on the Lamaze breathing learned with his mom
As Renner fought for his life on the ice that day, he writes that controlled breathing was a large part of what saved his life. This was something that he learned, he writes in the memoir, as a boy in a Lamaze class that he attended with his single mother when he was 12. The class at the YMCA on how to mitigate pain during childbirth wasn’t something he’d wanted to attend at the time, he recently told late-night host Jimmy Fallon, but it proved instrumental to his survival.
“There’s so much pain that you can’t quantify it in your brain. It’s just sort of not panicking and breathing through it all,” Renner said while promoting the book on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon this week. “And then I had to force breathe because there’s no reflexive breathing at this point, because the rib cages collapsed on the lung, the lung punctured, and the eyeballs went out. All this stuff’s happening. It’s pretty gruesome. … I gotta get my breath right. … I was just moaning and groaning, huffing to try to try to get air out, just so I can get a breath back in … because if you can’t breathe, I’m a goner.”
Renner was so desperate to leave the hospital that he plotted three escapes
Renner adds some levity to the gripping account of his terrible accident in discussing his deep desire to flee the hospital after he had stabilized but was still in no condition to leave the ICU. The accident took place on New Year’s Day and by Jan. 4, the actor was desperate to get out of the hospital, a place he says “are wonderful places for saving lives, but they’re less effective as places where people heal physically and mentally.”
With his nephew roped in as his accomplice, Renner described the feeble attempt to spring himself from the Reno hospital and get home to Los Angeles as “Escape from Alcatraz, but if you can’t swim.”
“Alex and I got out of the room at least,” he writes of his third escape attempt. “But it had taken a full 10 minutes of shuffling at a snail’s pace, trailing machines and wires behind me on shattered legs, mind you, and filled with pain meds — by which point news was spreading that Mr. Banana Legs was on the move.”
Renner found himself face-to-face with doctors, nurses, and family members who stared him down until he was told to get back to his room. He was still awaiting a crucial blood transfusion, and there was no way he’d be leaving the Reno hospital.
Renner went cold turkey on his pain medication
As he went through an arduous recovery, Renner was determined to get ahead of his pain management, even though the recovery he was going through was certainly excruciating.
“I’ve never seen anyone in so much pain. I was going to call the ambulance to take you back,” his mother told him of the night he left the hospital about two weeks after the accident.
Renner’s dose of OxyContin was increased by his pain manager, but within a couple of weeks, he went off of the medication entirely and at once. From there, he writes that he worked to control the pain, particularly that in his titanium-enhanced leg, through a unique technique he concocted.
“I started having some serious, pointed conversations and drag-out arguments with my leg,” Renner wrote. “It’s bizarre. I know. I must have seemed like a lunatic shouting directly in my leg. ‘Stop telling me that you’re broken, that you’re hurt, that I should be more careful,’ I shouted at my leg as a scorned lover: ‘You, sir, had been replaced with something better and stronger than bone, okay? So pipe down you son of a bitch,’ as I reprogram myself. Step by step, I learned more and more about my body’s limitations.”
Soon, he writes, he was able to reduce pain signals to the significance of an iPhone notification that he could merely swipe away.
“It took time and courage and a dash of insanity to build this accord to change how my body receives and understands pain, but this was the basis of what I came to describe as the agreement,” Renner wrote.
Renner eventually got back on the Snowcat that crushed him
A year after the accident that he says briefly killed him, Renner decided to go straight into his fear and get back on the Snowcat that crushed his bones and popped out his eyeball. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week, the actor discussed the experience.
“I didn’t want this thing to haunt me or own me by any means,” he said. “It was just interesting getting off of it because you have to step on the tracks to get off this thing. And I saw little pieces of my clothing still in it. And some other things that I don’t want to say.”
Even though these potential triggers were discovered within the vehicle, the actor climbed aboard and operated the machine. Speaking with Fallon, he found a clever metaphor for the experience.
“I just kind of wink and like, ‘Ha, I made it. You can’t beat me.” And I just kind of walk away,” Renner admitted. “It’s kind of like breaking up with your girlfriend you hadn’t seen in a while, and you get back together. And you’re like, ‘Yeah, you ain’t that good looking.’”
