5 Celebrities Who Must Have Gotten Final Destinationed
Between stunts gone wrong, constant air travel and the ever-present possibility of running into Kanye West, the kind of work that makes someone a celebrity can be dangerous. Some, however, have had so many improbable brushes with death that an otherworldly entity bent on fatal justice can’t be ruled out. Such as…
Jimmy Buffett
He may not have seemed like the thrill-seeking type, but King Parrothead had at least four near-death experiences, starting with one at age 19 that he claimed left him “at the bottom of the ocean, but I was too drunk to care about it.” He declined to elaborate, so who knows what that was about, but 10 years later, the ocean got him again when he fell asleep drunk on a dinghy and floated out to sea. In true Buffett fashion, he just kind of chilled until he floated past a drug-smuggling ship that pointed him to land. Later, a sea plane he piloted nearly capsized, and a case of mistaken identity led Jamaican authorities to attempt to shoot down a plane carrying Buffett as well as Bono. We almost lost an important music icon that day.
Steve McQueen
If anybody could almost out-party Jimmy Buffett to death, it would have been Steve McQueen, and he nearly did. In addition to getting shipwrecked in the Arctic during his time in the military, McQueen could have been killed by the disgruntled staff after he dined and dashed at a Mexican brothel and crashed his motorcycle twice, once on peyote. He was also supposed to be a guest of Sharon Tate’s on the night she was killed by the Manson family, so don’t let anybody guilt you out of blowing off plans.
Gene Roddenberry
Before he went where no man had gone before, Gene Roddenberry was a pilot and, like McQueen, almost didn’t escape the military alive. In the Air Force during World War II, Roddenberry was in two plane crashes that killed two others, and within just a few years after the war’s end, he experienced one more crash and a near-miss as a commercial pilot for Pan Am. At that point, he decided flying wasn’t for him.
Queen Elizabeth II
The most recent Queen Elizabeth spent a large chunk of her life as one of the world’s biggest assassination targets, but luckily, her would-be assassins were cartoon villain levels of incompetent. One was found to be shooting blanks, another was just a lousy shot and one tried to derail her train with a wooden block that just got lodged beneath the train’s wheels instead. She was also almost shot by a guard while walking around Buckingham Palace in the dark. It could have been history’s most significant night pee.
Leonardo DiCaprio
In the end, everyone previously mentioned survived long enough to die of a boring illness, but we still don’t know how death is going to get Leonardo DiCaprio, though we know how it’s tried. He’s been attacked by a Great White while cage-diving, survived a plane crash and managed to safely return to earth despite the failure of not one but two parachutes while skydiving. Then there was the time he almost died countless times in the freezing mountains while filming The Revenant. Thank goodness we gave him the Oscar, or who knows how he might have tempted death next?