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Jeremy Renner has detailed the chain of events which led to him being crushed by his own snowplough on New Year’s Day 2023.
Writing in his upcoming memoir, Renner, 54, has shared his memories of the moments before and during his experience being dragged under his own vehicle while trying to save his 27-year-old nephew, Alexander Fries, outside his home in Lake Tahoe.
Renner wrote: “I didn’t engage the parking brake, or disengage the steel tracks. 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.”
The actor describes how he believed Fries would be crushed between his snowcat and a truck was parked 10 feet away, and so leapt towards the controls in an attempt to hit the “stop” button, shouting “Not today, motherfucker” as he jumped.
Instead, Renner lost his footing and was propelled on to the ice in front of the truck, “where my head hit the ground hard and instantly gashed open”.
Renner continued: “There came terrible crunching sounds as 14,000lb of galvanised steel machinery slowly, inexorably, monotonously, ground over my body. It was a horrifying soundtrack.
Renner suffered 38 broken bones in the accident, as well as a collapsed lung and his liver was pierced by one of his broken ribs. The actor said he remained conscious throughout: “I knew that my skull was split like a watermelon, my brain pulverised like meat.”
He describes in detail the pain of every one of the snowcat’s wheels and tracks passing over him and feeling his bones give way. “Skull, jaw, cheekbones, molars; fibula, tibia, lungs, eye sockets, cranium, pelvis, ulna, legs, arms, skin; crack, snap, crack, squeeze, crack. More sounds: a ringing in the ears, as if a gun had unloaded next to my head. A sting of bright white in my eyes – I was blinded by a coruscating lightning, a lightning that signals the break of my orbital bone, causing my left eyeball to violently burst out of my skull.”
Fries administered first aid until emergency responders arrived and airlifted Renner to hospital. He spent two weeks there and had multiple surgeries. On his first day at home, Renner described how he headed “straight for my bar. I stood up out of my wheelchair, still on shattered legs, and poured myself a huge glass of red wine.”
The actor has since regained much of his physical function, appeared in the TV show Echo and shot Wake Up Dead Man, the third Knives Out movie.
His memoir is published on 29 April, and writing it was, he told People, a cathartic experience.
“I don’t not talk about it,” he said. “It’s part of my life every day, and it’s always a wonderful reminder of the strength of the human spirit and how fragile the body is and how badass it is at recovery.”
