Transcript of Preview: Jeremy Renner on Before & After with Lester Holt

Hi, I'm Kate Snow, NBC News anchor and host of the NBC News podcast, The Drink. This month, I'm sitting down with actor, writer, producer Brendan Hunt. Most of you know him as Coach Beard from Ted Lasso, but there is so much more to his story. We sit down, we talk about all of it, from his bumpy upbringing to his years in improv comedy and how a Hollywood rejection opened the door to co-creating Ted Lasso. It's an open, funny conversation about perseverance, creativity, and the winding road that brought him right here. We hope you'll join us for The Drink. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

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I'm Lester Holt from Dateline with a special preview of my new podcast, Before and After with Lester Holt. In our latest episode, I sit down with Jeremy Renner, the actor who was run over by a snowplow and nearly died. What are your sharpest memories lying there on the frozen driveway?

Well, my condition, my breath, the lack thereof. There was a time where the incident first happened, and then my nephew came to my side, but then he left. And I remember that feeling of him being gone being one of the loneliest feelings. If you're going to die, you don't want to die alone.

Paramedics said your heart rate went down to 18 or 19.

Yeah. They had to breathe for me a bit. They had to inject in my to my chest and did all these things so I would be okay. That's when I passed as well. I just ran out of energy. I just got tired. Pretty crazy.

What's it like to die?

Pretty peaceful. Wonderfully peaceful. It's magnificent. There's no questions because everything's answered. Everything just is. And it's all fueled in love, and everything's connected at once. And we're all connected as one thing.

Were you going on a journey?

Well, I don't know. It was more of like a flood of love and this overwhelming feeling of gratification, satisfaction. There's no void of anything. Like you have— like you're at the finish line of anything, whatever. There's a punctuation. It's more like a dot, dot, dot, the continuation of. If it's a punctuation, I think it would be the greatest thing for everyone to be able to do if you knew you can come out of it.

What do you mean? Getting run over?

Yeah, yeah, or just dying, being tested to your limits in a way. You realize how minuscule many of your problems are. It's great with perspective. You realize how, like, ridiculous we are here on Earth and our problems. There's all these things that are kind of real big issues for us, you know, down here, right? A parking ticket, you know, you're worried about a boyfriend or a thing, all these things, you know. All that doesn't matter.

Thanks for listening. Search Before and After with Lester Holt to hear the full episode now.

Next Friday on the Dateline season premiere.

My daughter's husband came here and he bought a knife.

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 9/8c, only on NBC.