Jeremy Renner might look like he’s healthy, but the actor says he has a long way to go in the wake of his near-fatal snowplow accident.
“My mouth is still complete chaos,” the actor, 54, told the Guardian in an interview published on Saturday, July 12. “It looks fine, but when I bite down it feels as if I’m going to break all my teeth.”
Renner was run over by his 14,000-pound snowplow on January 1, 2023. In the interview, he told the outlet that he broke six ribs in 14 places, suffered three breaks in his lower pelvis, broke both his right and left ankle, broke his left tibia, fractured his left wrist, broke three toes, broke his eye socket, mandible, and jaw, suffered a collapsed lung and had his liver pierced from a rib bone as a result of the accident.
In short: his body was extraordinarily damaged.
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“What I experienced when I passed was this collective divinity and beautiful, powerful peace,” he continued, adding that he is not religious but did have something of an other-worldly experience as he nearly died. “It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. It’s the highest adrenaline rush. Everything stopped … maybe for 30 seconds, maybe a minute. It was definitive for me. It all made perfect sense.”
Renner was plowing snow out of the way so his family could ski on New Year’s Day when the accident occurred. His 27-year-old nephew Alex was helping him at the time, and once they’d cleared the driveway Renner hopped out of the snowplow’s cab — but forgot to put the brake on.
The massive machine was headed toward his nephew when Renner acted swiftly to save his family member. He attempted to jump into the snowplow’s cab but missed, and as a result he was knocked to the ice. The machine ran him over and then kept going.
Renner was asked if the machine would have actually hit his nephew.
“It’s hard to say. You’ve not got time to make a rational decision,” the actor explained. “You just do it. The worst scenario is that he is crushed. So I just had to act. There was no way I was going to take that risk and see my nephew’s head on the ground cut in half. No chance. I’m not doing that. I’m not taking the chance, so that’s why I’d do it again in two seconds.”
The actor credits his neighbors Rich Kovach and Barb Fletcher, whom he had never met, and Alex with keeping him alive until help could arrive.
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“I was bullying my body into thinking it wasn’t that bad and my mind was overcoming the greatest odds it’s ever come up against. My mind was saying, ‘Nah!’ It was part stubbornness. ‘I don’t want to lose this battle, this game’, but the deeper part, the zoomed-out part, is I had so much to live for,” Renner explained.
The actor ultimately spent 12 days in the hospital, and has since released the record Love and Titanium about the incident.
