Jeremy Renner and his new book ‘My Next Breath’. Photo:
left: Flatiron Books
Jeremy Renner refuses to be haunted by his past.
The Avengers actor, 54, made headlines after being nearly crushed to death in his driveway by his 14,000 pound Snowcat plow on Jan. 1, 2023, and now, he’s sharing new details and an exclusive excerpt about the incident in his new memoir My Next Breath, due out April 29.
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“Writing about it has been very emotionally cathartic to have to go word by word through it all again,” Renner tells PEOPLE for a story in this week’s issue. “I don’t not talk about it. 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.”
In the book, Renner writes in excruciating detail about his experience — and his injuries, including the more than 35 broken bones in his body and how he saw “my left eye with my right eye” after his head was smashed against the pavement.
“I’m not haunted by the incident — not too often anyway — by the images, the sounds,” Renner says now. “But I am reminded of my new reality, and it’s wonderfully positive. I didn’t die.”
‘My Next Breath’ by Jeremy Renner. Flatiron Books
Renner was injured while trying to prevent the plow from crashing into his nephew Alex, who was 27 at the time of the accident. He says that while Alex is “doing great,” the trauma of that morning has been challenging for everyone.
“[Alex] read the book. Actually, we did listen to the book together, which was pretty intense, but we never really tried to push this under anything,” Renner explains. “If I get better, then he’ll get better. I put images in that kid’s head he cannot unsee, so I’m going to do anything I can to get better. So I’m healing him, he heals me. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Renner’s recovery in the immediate aftermath was nothing short of remarkable. As with Alex, the Mayor of Kingstown star credits his family — especially his daughter, Ava, now 12 — for motivating his rehabilitation.
Jeremy Renner and his daughter Ava. Rodin Eckenroth/FilmMagic
“It was a really wonderful gift to give my daughter to see how fallible I was, but also how we can overcome such obstacles. You can’t really teach a kid that except if it just happens to you,” Renner says. “She was my fuel to get better. I refused to give my daughter that fear or insecurity that I’m not going to be around. I’ve worked so hard in my life to ensure my daughter has a lot of fortitude and is not afraid of anything.”
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Renner, who will soon appear in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix, also reveals for the first time how his mother, Valerie, informed Ava of the accident.
“My daughter was scared and felt very helpless,” he tells PEOPLE, “so I gave her tasks to do. ‘You have to be my arms and be my legs. You have to help daddy now. You’ve got to do this and that, but I promise if you wait for me, I’ll get better.'”
Read — and listen to — an exclusive excerpt from My Next Breath below.
Jeremy Renner reads from ‘My Last Breath’
Frank spent hundreds of dollars that day, doing everything he could to distract and entertain Ava and her cousin Bella. Eventually, though, it became clear that someone had to tell Ava what was going on.
Kym had already reached out to Ava’s mom, Sonni, to keep her fully in the loop of what was happening. She had told Sonni that Ava was safe, that I’d had an accident, and asked her how she wanted Ava to be told. Because it was becoming clear that I was going to survive the incident at least, a plan was hatched to keep Ava away from seeing me in the hospital — who knows what the sight of my battered body all hooked up to machines might have done to her, though everyone agreed that it would be for certain too much. It was also agreed that my mom would head to the hotel to tell Ava as much as she thought she could handle.
Along with Kym, Nicky and Kayla, my mom headed to see Ava and to tell her the barest bones of what had happened.
Ava looked stricken.
“Oh no, oh my God. What?” she said. Bella grabbed her in a tight hug.
My family didn’t give her too many details, but it was clear that she could see and feel how somber, how serious the adults around her were. Everyone was there, holed up in some random hotel room, all just staring at her. She had to have felt all of that, and I think that’s what made her understand the seriousness of it. They tried to be as encouraging as possible — “Daddy’s strong, he’s going to get better” — but she remained very quiet.
And then, for the next hour, she sat on the hotel bed and watched videos of the two of us over and over and over on her iPad.
It broke everyone’s heart. It seemed like she was mourning something, not knowing what her life, my life, would be like moving forward. When she’d awoken that morning, my sweet daughter had been expecting to have me bound back in from clearing a path into an exciting new year, finally freed from the grip of the storm, heading up the mountain and hopefully onto the slopes to ski and snowboard and spend a magical day with her father. Instead, here she was, in a hotel room in Reno, being told that I’d been in an accident, that she couldn’t see me, that I would eventually get better … And in the face of this unbearable swerve in her life, she’d retreated to videos of us, her silence more heartshatteringly eloquent than any words she could have said.
It would be another 12 days before I saw Ava.
Excerpted from My Next Breath by Jeremy Renner Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
My Next Breath will be published on April 29 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.
