Jeremy Renner revealed the one “tiny but monumental” mistake he made before being run over by his snowplow on New Year’s Day in 2023.
“‘Before exiting the driver’s cab! – Apply parking brake,’ the manual says. But I didn’t engage the parking brake, or disengage the steel tracks,” Renner wrote in his new book, “My Next Breath.” “In that moment – an innocent, critical, life-changing moment – that tiny but monumental slip of the mind would change the course of my life for ever.”
“My feet lost their grip on the moving tracks, and I never made it to the cab. I lurched violently forward, out of control,” he wrote, according to an excerpt published by The Times. “In that split second I was catapulted off the spinning metal tracks, arms flailing. I arced over the front of the tracks, propelled forward, down on to the hard-packed ice, where my head hit the ground hard and instantly gashed open.
“There came terrible crunching sounds as 14,000lb of galvanised steel machinery slowly, inexorably, monotonously, ground over my body. It was a horrifying soundtrack.”
JEREMY RENNER GOES SHIRTLESS, REVEALING SCARS FROM NEAR-FATAL SNOWPLOW ACCIDENT: ‘I LOOK GREAT!’
Renner, 54, was run over by a snowplow on Jan. 1, 2023, at his Lake Tahoe home, resulting in traumatic injuries. The actor spent most of 2023 recovering and trying to return to his regular activities.
Bodycam footage showed what unfolded during Renner’s traumatic accident, where he was “completely crushed” by his 14,000-pound PistenBully Snowcat.
Renner was run over by the snowcat while attempting to tow a vehicle stuck in the snow following a massive storm. He was airlifted to a local hospital and had surgery after suffering blunt chest trauma and orthopedic injuries.
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The “Hawkeye” star recalled the moment he realized he was intensely injured.
“It’s like, you see your eye with your other eye because my eyeball was out,” Renner said during a previous appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” “So you have weird things that go through your head like, ‘Well, I guess that’s real, but like I’ll worry about that later.'”
He added: “And I look at my legs. They were all twisted up, and I’ll worry about that later because I’ve got to worry about breathing first, right?”
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Renner could barely breathe because he had a “popped lung,” but wasn’t aware of the injury in the immediate aftermath of the snowplow accident.
“I had to exhale with all my might so I [could] suck air back in,” Renner told Fallon. “Didn’t know I had a popped lung and all this other stuff going on. But I just had to breathe. If I didn’t breathe then I would have been gone, right?”
The accident served as a “great reminder of what we all should be looking at in life,” Renner added.
“If we get too stressed or if things get too difficult or if it’s insurmountable odds or whatever it might be. Just put one foot down and then put another foot down and then move towards it, right?”