Actors, typically, do not save lives. While they may play superheroes on the silver screen or hot doctors on Grey’s Anatomy, in real life actors are rarely met with the task of actually saving a person’s life. That type of stuff is typically left to firefighters, EMTs, and trauma surgeons, etc. However, the Daily Mail reports that Pussy Posse founder and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio defied the odds and literally saved a man’s life on December 30 while vacationing in the Caribbean to ring in the new year. DiCaprio was doing what members of the Pussy Posse do best — sipping rosé on a yacht near the island of St. Barts with their age-appropriate girlfriends — when the captain of his boat heard that a man had fallen off a cruise ship nearby. DiCaprio and company agreed to change their plans and search for the fallen man, eventually finding the 24-year-old, who had been treading water in the middle of the ocean for 11 hours (!) with no help in sight. To make the whole ordeal even more dramatic, DiCaprio’s crew rescued the man at dusk just before a massive rainstorm was due to hit the area and the captain called the rescue a “one in a billion shot.†Truly a cinematic feat in both scope and stakes.
The rescue is all the more sweet considering what happened, or, rather, what didn’t happen to DiCaprio’s sweet, sweet Jack in 1997’s Titanic (spoiler alert for anyone who figured out how to hack their way through the paywall but somehow don’t know how Titanic ends). As Keke Palmer shrewdly noted, Jack … literally drowns … for no reason … whatsoever. Rose had plenty of room on that raft. Why didn’t she just move her ass over? Brad Pitt would have! While it’s time we let go of our anger at Rose for letting Jack drown, it’s nice to know that DiCaprio went out of his way to save someone who might have suffered a similar fate. The whole event, while tremendous, begs more questions than it answers: What’s it like to be rescued by Leonardo DiCaprio? How many people had to smile and nod while Leo told his “Heroic Rescue Story†at the Golden Globes a week later, instead of eating their soup? Do you think DiCaprio sold the film rights to Quentin or Marty? Either way, the movie will be approximately five hours long and women will speak for a grand total of 32 minutes.