Preview: Jeremy Renner on Before & After with Lester Holt

In the rawest moment of the interview, Jeremy Renner describes what it felt like to die after being run over by his own snowcat in January 2023. Lying on a frozen Nevada driveway with his chest crushed and his breathing gone, the actor’s heart rate dropped to 18 or 19 beats per minute — a number paramedics would later tell him was barely compatible with life. “I just ran out of energy,” he says. “I just got tired.” But when Lester Holt asks what dying is actually like, Renner’s answer is not what most people expect.

The mechanics of the accident and the near-death state

Renner was operating a 14,000-pound PistenBully snowcat on his property near Lake Tahoe when the machine began rolling backward. He intended to jump into the cab to stop it, but the machine’s tread caught his leg, pulled him under, and then ran over his torso. The immediate physical damage was severe: multiple broken ribs on both sides of his chest, a collapsed lung, a lacerated liver, and a crushed right shoulder. But the episode focuses less on the orthopedic injuries and more on the physiological collapse that followed.