Before feeling grateful to paramedics for saving his life after a near-fatal snowplow accident, Jeremy Renner was mildly annoyed.
Speaking to Kelly Ripa for her podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera, Renner got frank about the harrowing 2023 accident, in which he was sucked under a seven-ton snowcat while saving his nephew from being hit, leaving him hospitalized for months with chest trauma and nearly 40 broken bones.
Sharing his memory of the experience, Renner told Ripa that he was “gone” for five to ten minutes—and he wasn’t too pleased when paramedics finally revived him.
“I didn’t want to come back,” the Hawkeye star, 54, told Ripa. “I remember, and I was brought back and I was so p—ed off.”
Explaining his feelings, Renner said that although his chest essentially “collapsed in on itself” during the accident, he felt a “wonderful relief” to be “removed from [his] body.”
“It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel,” Renner told Ripa. “You don’t see anything but what’s in your mind’s eye… It’s the highest adrenaline rush. But the peace that comes with it, it’s magnificent, it’s so magical.” When he finally woke up, Renner said his first thought was, “Yeah, that’s gonna hurt later.”
Now, after years of physical therapy, Renner is reflecting on his near-death experience in his new memoir My Next Breath. Renner previously told CBS Mornings that focusing on the “simplicity of breathing” helped keep him alive in the nearly 45 minutes it took emergency services to come to his aid.
Naturally, Ripa wanted to know more about Renner’s brief time in the afterlife. However, when the host asked Renner if he’d gotten to “speak to anyone,” the actor explained that his time wasn’t a “human experience.”
“Time is a human construct. It’s useless,” said Renner of his brief death. “[The afterlife] is not linear. It’s not how it exists. It’s just like the most remedial version of your spirit’s existence is being on Earth.”
Ultimately, Renner said that while he initially “didn’t want to come back,” the experience made him “really be able to be back here and live on my own terms as the captain of my own ship.”
According to Renner, being revived also made him realize what was most important in life: spending time with loved ones, especially his daughter, Ava, 12.
“I can’t stomach the things I gave credence to prior to the accident,” said Renner. “I invest into love and my shared relationships that I experience love with. Cause that is the only thing that you take with you.”
