Jeremy Renner has opened up about the ‘great relief’ he felt when he believed he experienced death.
The Marvel star recently said in his memoir, My Next Breath, that he briefly ‘died’ during a catastrophic snowplow accident on New Year’s Day in 2023.
Renner suffered more than 30 broken bones among his horror inures as doctors told him he came 'within millimetres of hitting a vital organ or major nerve'.
The 54-year-old was run over by his 14,000-pound snow plough while trying to save his nephew, Alex, from the same terrifying fate.
He wrote in his memoir that he briefly died about 30 minutes after as he lay in the snow outside his home, waiting for emergency responders to reach him in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Renner has since spoken out more about this experience of being ‘removed’ from his body, after writing: “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.”
He explained that his heart rate slowed as he lay in the cold. “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. I died, right there on the driveway to my house."
And in a follow-up interview on Kelly Ripa’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, Remmer described this as a ‘wonderful, wonderful relief’.
“It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. You don’t see anything but what’s in your mind’s eye,” Renner said.
“Like, you’re the atoms of who you are, the DNA, your spirit. It’s the highest adrenaline rush, but the peace that comes with it… it’s magnificent. It’s so magical.”
The star even said he ‘didn’t want to come back’ and was ‘so p****d off’ when he was.
“I came back and saw [my] eyeball and I’m like, ‘Oh sh*t, I’m back,’” he continued.
“Saw my legs. I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s gonna hurt later.’ I’m like, ‘All right, let me continue to breathe.’”
While he wrote of feeling a ‘connected, beautiful and fantastic energy’ when he ‘died’, he said that he eventually felt something urging him to not ‘let go’.
And now, Remmer sees his revival as a 'glory moment', having said in his memoir: "I didn’t f***ing die. So, the celebration of New Year becomes a recognition of the depth of the love in our family."