Jonah Hill Nearly Drowned During a Drunken Swim With Channing Tatum (And the Paparazzi Caught It All)
· Vice
While appearing on Conan O’Brien’s show in 2013, Jonah Hill opened up about a life-threatening experience he’d had the previous year in Sydney, Australia. The Superbad star was in town to promote his latest film at the time, 21 Jump Street, along with his co-star and close friend Channing Tatum.
During their long flight in, the pair apparently did a significant amount of drinking, which Hill said began as soon as they got on the plane. Upon arriving at their destination, Hill and Tatum—who, by Hill’s admission, were blackout drunk—decided to go for a little swim.
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After inquiring about the local beaches, the two set their sights on Bondi Beach, not knowing that it was where the long-running Australian reality show Bondi Rescue was filmed. Hill and Tatum got to swimming, and in what felt like a very short period of time, Hill realized that he’d been separated from Tatum, who now seemed like he was a mile away.
13 Years Ago, Jonah Hill Nearly Drowned During a Drunken Swim With Channing Tatum (And the Paparazzi Caught Everything)
As Tatum was over by the shore taking pictures with fans, Hill found himself caught in a rip current, swimming as hard as he could without going anywhere. “I literally, like, saw my whole life flash before my eyes,” Hill recalled.
Exhausted and bobbing along without making any progress, Hill thought for sure that he was about to die. Thankfully for him, a man on a jet ski pulled up in the nick of time and brought him to safety. “Hey, mate, we gotta pull you in…you can die out here,” Hill remembered the kind stranger telling him. Ordinarily, that would be where a story like this would end, but to make matters even more humiliating, the paparazzi just happened to be lurking around the beach that day.
Not only did photographers get some unflattering shots of Hill struggling out in the ocean, but they also caught him looking traumatized on the beach afterward. Because the pictures were quickly plastered across every newspaper in town, the incident was all everyone wanted to ask Hill about for the duration of the week-long promotional tour he and Tatum were on. “Heard you went for a swim yesterday,” one interviewer reportedly said to him the next day.
The post Jonah Hill Nearly Drowned During a Drunken Swim With Channing Tatum (And the Paparazzi Caught It All) appeared first on VICE.