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There are a lot of sharks in Hollywood, but Leonardo DiCaprio almost fell prey to the real thing.
DiCaprio, 39, casually dropped details of the close call in a conversation with Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show Tuesday, revealing how he overcame his fear of sharks by cage diving with great whites.
While talking about a recent auction for the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the Wolf of Wall Street star recounted the fishy tale to the host.
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“I went scuba diving looking for sharks. I had a huge fear of sharks and when I did Blood Diamond in 2006, I actually got stuck in a cage with a great white — which was awesome,” he said, ironically. “It was a gigantic great white. It was in a cage with me,” he stressed.
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Aghast at hearing of the near-death encounter, Ellen asked: “How did you survive that?”
“I don’t know,” DiCaprio replied, prompting DeGeneres to ask if he was making it up.
“I’m not. They actually said, ‘In 30 years, this has never happened.’ The tuna kind of got stuck on the top of the cage,” DiCaprio went on to explain.
“The great white leapt out and tried to bite it and went into the cage with me, half of its body was in and out, and I flattened out at the bottom. And it was this far away, and it chomped a few times but I survived it,” he revealed.
Circling back to all the good deeds of environmental groups, DiCaprio added: “The work that they are doing is great, and they’re protecting sharks.
“I don’t want to discount their work because they are doing great stuff, but it was absolutely terrifying!”
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Earlier in the interview, the Golden Globe nominee recalled a more low-key trip that he recently took with a nonprofit organization to Nepal.
“When I work with NGOs, these nonprofit organizations, you go on the ground and see what’s happening, I did a whole excursion when I went to Nepal on the back of elephants and looked for tigers, of course I didn’t see a single tiger. They blend into the jungle,” he revealed.
Watch the full clip from the interview below.
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