As the great environmentalist that he is, Leonardo DiCaprio has had memorable encounters with all kinds of animal, big and small, including the much-feared shark. While most of them went smoothly and uneventfully, one of them nearly proved fatal. DiCaprio was filming "Blood Diamond" in South Africa in 2006 when he went scuba diving off the country's shark-riddled coast and found himself stuck in a cage with a "gigantic great white," he said on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in January 2014.
Scuba driving instructors leave the cage open at the top and pump tuna in the surrounding area to attract the sharks, he explained in a 2015 interview with Wired. But an unfortunate event led to near disaster. "The tuna kind of got stuck on the top of the cage and the great white leaped out and tried to bite it, and it went into the cage with me," he told DeGeneres.
Instinctively, DiCaprio dove to the bottom of the cage, to create as much distance as possible between him and the sharp-toothed animal. "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," DiCaprio said. Fortunately for DiCaprio, sharks are smart creatures and this great white managed to flip its massive body around and escape the confines of the cage. "I have it on video. It's insane," DiCaprio told Wired.
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