(NEW YORK) — Leonardo DiCaprio has survived a shark attack, a skydiving accident, and a near plane crash, and he tells Wired in its January issue, “If a cat has nine lives, I think I’ve used a few.”
“A great white jumped into my cage,” the 41-year-old star of the forthcoming The Revenant recalled of the time he went diving in South Africa. “Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me.”
“They leave the tops open and you have a regulator line running to the surface. Then they chum the water with tuna,” he explains. A wave came and the tuna sort of flipped up into the air.”
A shark jumped up and grabbed the tuna, and half its body landed inside the cage with me,” he recalls. “I sort of fell down to the bottom and tried to lie flat. The great white took about five or six snaps an arm’s length away from my head. The guys there said that has never happened in the 30 years they’d been doing it.”
Amazingly enough, that experience didn’t kill his thirst for adventure. He had another close call while skydiving.
The actor tells Wired, “It was a tandem dive. We pulled the first chute. That was knotted up. The gentleman I was with cut it free. We did another free fall for like another five, ten seconds. I didn’t even think about the extra chute, so I thought we were just plummeting to our death.”
“He pulled the second, and that was knotted up too,” notes Leonardo. “He just kept shaking it and shaking it in midair, as all my friends were, you know, what felt like half a mile above me, and I’m plummeting toward earth. [Laughs.] And he finally unravels it in midair.”
However, they weren’t out of the woods just yet, as DiCaprio explains. “The fun part was when he said, ‘You’re probably going to break your legs on the way down, because we’re going too fast now.’ So after you see your whole life flash in front of your eyes — twice — he says, “Oh, your legs are going to get broken too.”
Even when DiCaprio isn’t looking for adventure, it somehow seems to find him, as with the time he was on an airplane flight bound for Russia.
“I was in business class, and an engine blew up in front of my eyes, he remembers. “It was right after “Sully” Sullenberger landed in the Hudson. I was sitting there looking out at the wing, and the entire wing exploded in a fireball. I was the only one looking out at the moment this giant turbine exploded like a comet. It was crazy.”
Adds DiCaprio, “They shut all the engines off for a couple of minutes, so you’re just sitting there gliding with absolutely no sound, and nobody in the plane was saying anything. It was a surreal experience.”
He says luckily, pilots were able to restart the engines and the plane made an emergency landing at New York’s JFK Airport.
DiCaprio has more than a few brushes with death onscreen in his upcoming film The Revenant, in which he plays a fur trapper who fights for survival in the 1820s. The movie opens nationwide January 8.
Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
