Leonardo DiCaprio opens up to Wired about his brushes with death, "If a cat has nine lives, I think I've used a few." The "Titanic" actor talks about his death-defying characters that have mostly placed him in nerve-wracking situations, a report from E! Online said.
"My friends have named me the person they least want to do extreme adventures with because I always seem to be very close to being part of a disaster," DiCaprio shared.
In his latest Golden Globe nominated role in the movie "The Revenant", Leo worked double time to avoid death. In the movie, he plays a fur-trapper stranded in the wilderness. The movie was certainly all make-believe, but in reality, the 41-year-old actor is no stranger to dangerous situations. He is known to have faced death on several occasions.
Leonardo explained how he once narrowly missed getting eaten by a great white shark in South Africa. The ferocious creature accidentally jumped into his cage as they launched tuna into the water. "The great white took about five or six snaps an arm's length away from my head," he mentioned. "The guys there said that has never happened in the 30 years they'd been doing it."
Another occasion, the actor narrated how a plane ride he took to Russia was almost consumed in flames. "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," he recounted during the interview. "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."
The flight landed back in New York safely.
Finally, "The Wolf of Wall Street" actor recounted the third time he looked death in the eye. This was during a tandem skydive; he almost fell to his death after his parachute got knotted up.
"I didn't even think about the extra chute, so I thought we were just plummeting to our death. [His partner] pulled the second, and that was knotted up too. 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," he joked, revealing that the parachute had finally been unknotted.
"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."
The actor is hoping that his role in "The Revenant" will finally earn him a much-awaited Oscar.
