Renner Reflects on Near-Fatal Accident with Playful Social Media Post
Jeremy Renner marked the third anniversary of nearly losing his life in a snow plow accident by sharing a post of the vehicle that struck him.
Posting via his Instagram Stories on Thursday, January 1, the actor, 54, uploaded a photograph of the snow plow alongside a playful caption.
“Not today,” the Avengers star wrote, adding a winking gesture as well as a kiss gesture. He added, “Rain delay.”
Renner followed up the lighthearted post with another Instagram Story that featured a photograph of a child on a path, surrounded by snow.
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“Happy New Year. A New day,” the Dahmer star captioned the shot. “And new pathways filled with Love and adventure.”
On New Year’s Day in 2023, the actor was taken to a hospital after sustaining serious injuries in the harrowing accident that saw him crushed by a PistenBully, a snow-removal vehicle weighing over 14,330 pounds.
Renner was attempting to rescue his young nephew Alex Fries from being hit in the terrible incident that occurred near his home in Nevada. As a result of the accident, Renner suffered more than 38 broken bones, including six broken ribs in 14 places, a broken tibia and a collapsed lung.
The Hawkeye star detailed his close call with death in his memoir My Next Breath, which was released in April 2025.
“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 simply grew exhausted,” Renner wrote in the book. “After roughly 30 minutes on the ice, of manually breathing for so long, an effort similar to doing 10 or 20 push-ups per minute for half an hour … that’s when I died.”
He added, “I died, right there on the driveway to my house.”
Speaking about the memoir during an April 2025 appearance on The Jimmy Fallon Show, Renner admitted he initially hesitated to write about the devastating accident in the book.
“I went through a year and I was doing quite well. I was walking again. Then the idea of writing the book came around and I was like, ‘Oh, God, I have to relive this?’ It was quite a challenge,” Renner said.
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“But I quickly realized, it was important for me to move past this. To relive it, to recount it, to own it in a different way, word by word, was quite healing for me,” he continued. “But also, it didn’t just happen to me. It happened to my poor nephew, who was holding my arm and watching me bleed out and all that sort of thing. It’s healing for him. And for my mother, who had to get that phone call and drive 13 hours through a snowstorm to get to me in the hospital. It was healing in a lot of different ways.”
The book wasn’t the first time Renner recalled details of the snowplow accident publicly. He also spoke about the experience in several media interviews including Men’s Health in July 2024.
“I remember every contour,” he told the outlet at the time. “I remember my head striking the thing and it simply pressing on me — it’s exactly like you think it would feel. An immovable object and a crushing force, and something’s gotta give. But thank God my skull didn’t fully give.”
