Los Angeles, Dec 16 (IANS) Actor Leonardo DiCaprio has shared that he has had three near-death experiences, including a shark attack, an engine explosion on a plane and a skydiving accident.
“A great white jumped into my cage when I was diving in South Africa. Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at 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,” DiCaprio told Wired magazine, reports femalefirst.co.uk.
Also, a plane the “Titanic” was a passenger in, was forced to make an emergency landing after an engine caught fire.
“Then there was this Delta Airlines flight to Russia. I was in business class, and an engine blew up in front of my eyes. 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,” the 41-year-old actor said.
“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 (New York airport),” he added.
And the “Inception” stars’s third brush with death caused his life to flash before his eyes.
“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. And 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.’ 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’,” he said.