Jeremy Renner

Before & After with Lester Holt

The episode features an intimate interview with actor Jeremy Renner regarding his near-fatal snowcat accident on New Year's Day 2023. He rec

Key takeaways

• Jeremy Renner suffered nearly 40 broken bones and a crushed rib cage during the snowcat accident.
• The incident occurred when Renner jumped onto a moving 14,000-pound machine to prevent it from hitting his nephew.

Main topics

• Snowcat accident details
• Physical recovery and medical trauma

Notable quotes

I'm probably better than before and stronger than before.

Conclusion

A profound exploration of resilience and finding spiritual clarity thr

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) Next Friday on the Dateline season premiere. Speaker 6 (0:03) My daughter's husband ain't here and he bought a night. Speaker 7 (0:05) I immediately thought something was off. It's like she's baiting a trap. Yes, that's what it looks like. The Dateline season premiere Friday night at 9, 8 central. Only on NBC. Speaker 8 (0:19) Stay informed with the NBC News app. Speaker 7 (0:21) Major developments Speaker 8 (0:22) out of the White House. Read, watch, and listen throughout your day. And now, unlock even more with an NBC News subscription. Get deeper reporting and exclusive articles. Plus, more insight, analysis, and content only for subscribers. When you really look inside these numbers. It's more context and clarity from the reporters you trust. Download the NBC News app now and subscribe for more. Speaker 5 (0:51) I'm glad it happened. One of the greatest things happened to me on that day when I got ran over. The greatest thing happened. Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up. The greatest thing? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2 (0:59) I'm Speaker 3 (0:59) blown away. I'm Speaker 1 (1:01) really blown away to hear Speaker 3 (1:01) you say that. Speaker 2 (1:02) Because I'm Speaker 5 (1:02) proud of where I'm at and where I've become. Speaker 1 (1:07) There are moments that divide a life into before and after. For Jeremy Renner, that moment came on New Year's Day 2023 on a frozen driveway in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. He's known to millions as Marvel superhero Hawkeye, an actor known for doing his own stunts, for his Oscar-nominated role in The Hurt Locker, and now as mayor of Kingstown. Trust no one in this. I tell you to do so. Speaker 1 (1:38) Someone will come after you. But on that winter morning, he wasn't a movie star. He was just Jeremy. Snowed in with his family after a massive storm, trying to clear a way out with the help of his nephew. Renner was operating a 14,000-pound snowcat when he slipped off the moving machine and fell beneath its tracks. His body shattered, nearly 40 bones broken in nearly 100 places. His rib cage crushed. His nephew ran to get help from a neighbor. Speaker 7 (2:12) Are there any obvious injuries? Oh my God, yes. And then is there any serious bleeding? Speaker 6 (2:18) Yes. Okay. Speaker 1 (2:20) But the conversation you're about to hear is not just about a celebrity's miraculous survival. It's about what happens when what really matters becomes clearer. When life is reduced to one breath at a time. It's about before and after. Here is my conversation with Jeremy Renner. Speaker 3 (2:48) I see you as I walk in the door, you reach out, you give me a bro hug. That's right. And my instinct was to kind of like, is he okay? Oh, really? Like I'm afraid I'm going to hurt him, like he's fragile. I can't be Speaker 2 (3:00) the first person to say that. No, I guess not. I guess maybe if, you know, because we haven't seen each other in a long time, right? I guess that might go through people's brains, but I'm probably better than before and stronger than before. You look great. Yeah, hanging in there, not bad, right? I should be more fragile, you know, but I'm... I'm a lot of titanium, so I'm stronger. You should be more than that. I should be dead, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3 (3:20) When you say those words, I should be dead. People will say stuff like that in a flippant way, but this is real life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty awesome, though. The premise of the impetus behind this podcast is over the years, how many people I have encountered, I've covered stories of everything was going one way, and then it goes the other way. Is that something you contemplate a lot? Yeah, Speaker 2 (3:42) I mean, I think that's sort of the way I live my life. The acute awareness of my gratitude, of my next fucking breath and my next step. Speaker 3 (3:50) You grew up in Modesto? Yeah. For your career, you moved on to L.A.? Yep. Speaker 2 (3:55) Yeah, 31 years in L.A. Yeah, living there for a while. So you weren't always a famous, well-paid actor? Oh, man. No, I mean, Hurt Locker, I was 38 or so, and Speaker 5 (4:05) Hurt Locker caught fire. There's too many locks! There's too many. I can't do it. I can't get it off. I'm sorry, okay? You understand? I'm sorry. Tell Speaker 3 (4:15) me this rings a bell, because I have this vivid memory. You were at the Today Show the morning of the Oscar nominations to be announced. Speaker 4 (4:22) Okay, we're going to go live to Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills for the nominations. Speaker 3 (4:26) Yeah, live television. Live television. I was in the studio that day. Yeah. And I remember you guys sitting on the sofa. I remember this. And they cut to L.A. and they made the announcement that you got nominated. Speaker 2 (4:38) Oscar nod. Like on Speaker 3 (4:39) live TV. Speaker 2 (4:40) Like, oh, man. Speaker 4 (4:41) The nominees for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role are Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker. Speaker 3 (4:49) Well, I remember I never heard of this guy, Jeremy. I'd seen the movies. I knew who you were at that point, but I didn't know much about you. Can we talk about your family? Sure. Tell me about what your upbringing was like. Speaker 5 (5:00) It was great. I'm the oldest of seven kids and close to my family always all my life. When my parents divorced, I was in, I don't know, third grade or so. And they always lived across the street from each other. And we moved around a lot. So I went to a lot of different schools. But my dad was pretty much always living across the street. So I went to dad's for the weekend, just walk across the street. That's perfect. And Speaker 2 (5:18) stayed Speaker 5 (5:18) pretty connected, even though, you know, there's divorce and things can be splintered. There's always really closeness all throughout my life. And the family is kind of everything to me. It's, I grew up in a large family and there was always, I don't want to say a torch holder, but someone who had, he always went to grandma's or went to grandpa's or then to my dad or somebody just Speaker 2 (5:39) always held the thing that united everybody together. Torch got passed to me. And it's everything to me. And I love the responsibility of loving them all so much. There's times where I don't know everybody's name sometimes. It's like everybody's having babies Speaker 5 (5:53) and stuff. I'm like, oh my God, I can't catch up with everybody. I thought Speaker 3 (5:56) I was the only one. No, Speaker 2 (5:57) man, Speaker 5 (5:57) it's brutal. It's like, oh my, you can't, like my sister has like a whole spreadsheet of all the birthdays, the stuff that's going on. And then she, there's like a newsletter that goes out and these family chats. They're like, it's like a little village. It's crazy to keep up with. And it's very easy for large families to divide once they get significant others and kids and move across the country or the world. You know, it takes a lot of work to keep a family together. And we work very hard to do that. So I've been fortunate enough in my success to get a house that can house everybody. Having the house in Lake Tahoe is always having like Speaker 2 (6:31) a Speaker 5 (6:31) great magical Christmas Speaker 2 (6:33) and uniting the family together. There's like 25 people everywhere I roll. You know, I got like those little shuttle buses and stuff so we can get around. Speaker 3 (6:42) This particular holiday, Wicked Storm comes to the Sierra. You barely make it in. Yeah. We missed our flight. It was the last flight out before the storm was coming in. Speaker 5 (6:52) It was a three-, four-day storm. It was going to dump, you know, anywhere from like 10 to 25 feet of snow, which is a lot of mass of snow. But once we're up there, let's get snowed in. Who cares, right? Getting snowed out is not an option. We need to Speaker 2 (7:07) go get, I'll get snowed in. That's better. Because then we'll all be together. We got the dogs, I have my little daughter. So we ended up just driving up and getting up there and we all made it. We all somehow made it and it was great. You end up with no power. Yeah. Speaker 5 (7:20) The kids are off the iPads and, you know, the Wi-Fi's down, playing cards. I mean, the family knows how to have fun. So the limited amount of power that we did have, we had disco balls going and we're playing pool with headlamps on. We had a lot of fun. Speaker 3 (7:33) Talking about, you Speaker 2 (7:34) know, what happened, you were out there, it was New Year's Day. Yeah. We saw that the roads were closed, skiing wasn't going to happen, so we're going to make a plan as we take the snowcat and go make some sledding trails on the property since we couldn't Speaker 3 (7:47) go skiing. For folks who don't understand what a snowcat is, I describe it this way. It's kind of like a tank without a gun. Yeah, Speaker 2 (7:54) exactly. It's Speaker 3 (7:55) got Speaker 2 (7:55) a big, giant... 2,000-pound blade in the front of it that pushes snow. I've seen them at ski resorts before. Exactly. They make the trails and groom the trails at ski resorts. These big metal-bladed tanks. And they're amazing machines. They're really nimble and powerful and Speaker 3 (8:09) heavy. This all began with you recognizing that your nephew was in serious danger. Oh, Speaker 2 (8:17) yeah, yeah, yeah. We were clearing a ton of snow, generational sort of storm that we had. And the incident was we're clearing all this stuff out of the driveway. And Kat was sliding, and I was standing outside of it, got into gear, was rolling towards my nephew who was going to crush him. So within five to seven seconds, he was going to get crushed. So I jumped back on this rolling machine stupidly, but trying to save my nephew from getting killed. And were you Speaker 1 (8:44) keenly aware of what was about to happen to you? Speaker 2 (8:47) No, no, not at all. Because it happened pretty fast. The machine's moving pretty quick. I mean, it's moving probably 10 miles an hour. So I jump on this over the tracks to try to turn this thing off. There's a button you can hit and just stop the thing. Otherwise, it's going to keep rolling. It's just going to be like the Terminator. Just keep going until something stronger than it stops it. So that's why I try to jump on it. And then it happened very quickly. I didn't stop it at all. So you went under the track. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 14 Speaker 3 (9:15) ,000 pounds. Speaker 2 (9:16) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just a piece of driftwood under this thing, right? First thing was just hitting my head on the ground and slammed. It would have been nice if it was like I was on snow, you know, but I was on ice and asphalt. So there's