LL Cool J is well known for is onscreen acting roles (NCIS: Los Angeles) as much as he is for his hip-hop music career, and one standout movie on LL’s filmography is no doubt the 1999 horror-thriller shark movie Deep Blue Sea. In that film LL Cool J played “Preacher,” the cook on the undersea base station where a group of scientists unwittingly engineer a group of super-intelligent sharks, that quickly break loose and go beserk, trapping the human prey underwater and hunting them down, one by one.
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Deep Blue Sea achieved some lesser milestone by having LL Cool J’s Preacher survive, an upset to the trend of killing of black characters in horror. However, it turns out that while LL Cool J’s Preacher survived was destined to survive Deep Blue Sea, the actor himself didn’t have the same gurantee. As he now recounts, LL Cool J almost drowned while filming Deep Blue Sea!
LL Cool J did his solemn duty and appeared on the hit talk show/eating challenge, Hot Ones. During his interview, host Sean Evans asked if the rumor was true that it was one of the animatronic sharks snagging LL Cool J’s left leg that almost caused him drown while filming a scene for Deep Blue Sea:
“Thousand percent true. Facts. One-hundred percent facts. I was on the set, I was probably #479 on the call sheet, and you know, I was in the middle of a take and [they called] ‘Lunch!’ And the guy holding the little [shark] joystick goes: [imitates cartoonish running] ‘Pastrami!’ and they just bailed on me. And there I was, just [makes thrashing, dangling motion] – like it was real! And they said ‘Oh!’ and gave me this little breathing apparatus, like something you blow out and then breathe in; I blow out, I breathe in, all water! Took it to another level. But I ended up struggling and getting out, I climbed out, and there was one dude sitting there with a cigarette, like [imitates raspy chuckle] ‘I saw what happened.’ So it was cool.”
That certainly sounds less than cool, and we also have quite a few questions about what befell those crew members that “bailed” on LL and left him nearly drowning. Still the irony of the unkillable man of horror movies nearly really dying as result of a fake shark is… something.
If you haven’t seen Deep Blue Sea, check out the synopsis below then go out and watch it.
A businessman sinks $200 million into a special project to help fight Alzheimer’s disease. As part of this project, medical biologist Susan McAlester rather naughtily figures out a way to genetically enlarge shark brains, so that disease-battling enzymes can be harvested. However, the shark subjects become super smart and decide they don’t much like being cooped up in pens and being stabbed with hypodermics, so they figure a way to break out and make for the open sea…
