By the turn of the century, Leonardo DiCaprio was a major star but sought to distance himself from the romantic hero typecast attained by prominent roles in Titanic and Romeo + Juliet. Following an appearance in Danny Boyle’s 2000 movie The Beach, DiCaprio fell under Martin Scorsese’s spotlight, courtesy of his This Boy’s Life co-star Robert De Niro, just in time for 2002’s Gangs of New York.

Through the 2000s and into the 2010s, DiCaprio busied himself with an impressive variety of iconic leading roles, including those in The Aviator, The Departed, Blood Diamond, Inception and The Wolf of Wall Street. Despite several near misses following his first nomination in 1994, DiCaprio didn’t get his hands on an Oscar until 2016, when he won ‘Best Actor’ for his role in The Revenant.

Released in 2015, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant was a largely fictionalised account of the life of legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass. As the legend dictates, Glass is left for dead by his companions after being mauled within an inch of his life by a grizzly bear.

Although DiCaprio didn’t have to fight off a real bear for his Oscar, the project was notably challenging. When asked by TimeOut to gauge how demanding the role was out of ten, DiCaprio replied: “Ten. But we all knew what we were signing up for. We couldn’t recreate this with CGI. We all knew that we were stepping into a Fitzcarraldo, Heart of Darkness type of experience.’

With most of the movie shot out in the elements, DiCaprio was put through his paces, much like his legendary character. “The real nemesis was the cold, every single day,” he added. “I had a special machine I called ‘the octopus’, which was like a giant hairdryer with eight tentacles that I warmed my body with between takes.”

Undoubtedly, The Revenant was a challenge for the cast, but it wasn’t DiCaprio’s first tango with the elements. In 2006, while shooting Blood Diamond in Cape Town, South Africa, the actor went cage diving during his downtime to see some great white sharks. DiCaprio detailed his near-death experience in a 2014 interview with Ellen DeGeneres.

“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 told DeGeneres.

“It was a gigantic great white,” he added. “They actually said in 30 years this has never happened, but the tuna kind of got stuck on the top of the cage, and 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 down at the bottom, and it was this far away [arm’s length], and it chomped a few times, but I survived it. […] It was absolutely terrifying.”

As if the shark incident wasn’t enough, Dicaprio cheated death on another occasion, this time a few thousand feet in the air. “The other one was the skydiving incident,” he said while detailing his near-death experiences in a 2015 interview with Wired. “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.”

“I didn’t even think about the extra chute, so I thought we were just plummeting to our death,” DiCaprio continued. “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. [Laughs.] And he finally unravels it in midair.”

The actor later reflected on his near-death experiences in his conversation with TimeOut. “It’s strange because it gets right down to basics,” he said. “It’s no more dramatic than getting a parking ticket. You just feel like, ‘Shit, why did this have to happen today? I’m so young; I have such a great life ahead of me. This really sucks.’ There’s nothing intensely profound about it other than the will to survive.”

When asked if his life flashed before his eyes, Dicaprio replied, “Actually, yes: I’ve had a couple of experiences like that where you get the glossy photos of your whole life passing by in a second – that stuff really does happen. Certainly, that happened with the parachuting thing.”

Watch the bear attack scene from The Revenant below.