Leonardo DiCaprio Recalls Death-Defying Experiences As He Promotes Survival Film

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Mon Dec 14, 2015 08:06PM

Leonardo DiCaprio has cheated death three times in his life and lived to tell the tale.The movie star is winning great reviews for his role as a real-life bear-attack survivor in The Revenant, and he has opened up about his own near-death experiences in a plane, a shark cage and while skydiving.
The adventurer tells Wired magazine a great white shark "jumped into my cage when I was diving in South Africa".
"Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me," he recalls. "They leave the tops open and you have a regulator line running to the surface. Then they chum the water with tuna. 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. 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."
And Leo recalls staying calm after watching an engine explode on a plane in which he was a passenger: "I was the only one looking out at the moment this giant turbine exploded like a comet," he says. "It was crazy. 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. They started the engines back up, and we did an emergency landing at JFK."
But a skydiving mishap really brought his life - and the ground - flashing in front of him.
"It was a tandem dive," he explains. "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, 10 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. He just kept shaking it and shaking it in mid-air, as all my friends were, you know, what felt like half a mile above me, and I´m plummeting toward earth. He finally unravels it in mid-air. 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´."