Jeremy Renner Says He Was ‘Basically Dead’ After Being Crushed By 14,000-Lbs. Snowplow, Says He Felt ‘Fantastic Engery’ On ‘Other Side’

Baila Eve ZismanApril 29, 2025, 5:56 pmNews >

In Jeremy Renner’s new memoir, My Next Breath, released on April 29, he shared details of his brief encounter with death.

On January 1, 2023, Renner thought he had died when he was crushed by a snowplow at his home in Nevada while saving his nephew Alex Fries from the same fate.

“Six f—ing wheels, seventy-six steel blades, 14,000 pounds of machine, all ranged against one human bod…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.

“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…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 a half hour…that’s when I died. I died right there on the driveway to my house.

“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.”

It was 45 minutes before first responders reached Renner. ”I know I died – in fact, I’m sure of it,” the actor recounted. He noted the EMTs had said his heart rate “had bottomed out at 18,” meaning he was “basically dead.”

Recalling what he found on the other side, Renner said, “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…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.”

There has long been a theory that upon death, humans relive the entirety of their lives in seven minutes before succumbing to eternal darkness.

Surveys of people who have legally died and come back to life find that an overwhelming majority of individuals, religious and not, reported a similar feeling of calm and lost time amid complete darkness, akin to what Renner described. A smaller number report seeing white pearly gates.

Renner wrote, “I didn’t f—ing die…so the celebration of New Year becomes a recognition of the depth of the love in our family.”