The actor opens up to Wired magazine about his nine lives.
So maybe Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t get raped by a bear in his new movie, The Revenant, but it still sounds like the shoot provided plenty of difficulties.
“Every single day of this movie was difficult. It was the most difficult film I’ve ever done,” the actor told Wired magazine. “You’ll see, when you see the film. The endurance that we all had to have is very much up on the screen.”
In fact, the 41-year-old says that a number of near-death experiences in the past helped prepare him for the shoot. “I always seem to be very close to being part of a disaster,” he explained. “If a cat has nine lives, I think I’ve used a few.”
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So, in which ways has Leonardo DiCaprio nearly been killed? Let us recount:
By Way of Shark: Or, “The Shark Incident,” as he calls it. “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,” he revealed in the issue, out Dec. 22.
“They leave the tops open…[and] then they chum the water with tuna,” he recalled. “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.”
By Way of Explosion: “A [plane] engine blew up in front of my eyes,” DiCaprio said of a flight to Russia. “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.
“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 explained. “They started the engines back up, and we did an emergency landing.”
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By Way of Skydiving: Or “The Skydiving Incident,” as he calls it. “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 5, 10 seconds,” he said.
“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 midair, as all my friends were, you know, what felt like half a mile above me, and I’m plummeting toward earth,” the actor recalled with a laugh. “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.”
For the record, he no longer skydives.
Could The Revenant earn DiCaprio his first Oscar? He already got a Golden Globe nomination for it! Check out who else was nominated:
