Leonardo DiCaprio has experienced plenty of extremes throughout his life, but the actor came close to death in the Galapagos Islands back in 2010 while scuba diving, Entertainment Tonight reports.
Fisher Stevens, who directed DiCaprio’s documentary, Before the Flood, told GQ in a new interview that he was on a TED conference expedition to the Galapagos Islands in 2010 with DiCaprio when the actor had a seriously scary moment while diving.
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“The second time we properly hung out together was in 2010 when I was invited to film Sylvia Earle for a TED conference expedition to the Galapagos,” Stevens said. “Leo was on the expedition. I was filming Sylvia and I had this little easy camera to shoot underwater, and he was Sylvia’s diving buddy, so I said, would you film Sylvia? And he said, ‘Yeah I love it man, I love it’. I was diving buddies with Edward Norton. So we go down and we see 300 Eagle Rays and Spotted Rays and it was an amazing dive.”
Stevens explained that the next time he saw DiCaprio, the actor’s oxygen tank had sprung a leak and he had had to be rescued by Norton.
“Leo bolts away with Sylvia, and Edward goes in front of me and the next thing I know after twenty minutes I’d lost them all,” Stevens continued. “Then, I see Leo buddy breathing, because Leo’s tank was leaking oxygen, and Edward had to save him! It was pretty crazy. But he actually did get some film for me and it was good for a second and then it got pretty shaky when he couldn’t breathe. But we really bonded on that trip.”
The story also appeared in an interview DiCaprio did with Rolling Stone in January, revealing that the actor ran out of oxygen and began to panic before he was rescued by Norton.
That wasn’t the first near-death experience DiCaprio has had, as he told Wired previously a great white shark jump into his cage in South Africa, a plane engine “blew up” before his eyes on a trip to Russia and he has also had a terrifying experience while skydiving in which two of his parachutes were knotted up before his diving partner managed to unravel one.
“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 said. “If a cat has nine lives, I think I’ve used a few.”
Originally posted on Womanista.com.
