African safari gone too wild! During an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman on Tuesday, July 9, the Grown Ups 2 star Adam Sandler shared a scary video of a close encounter he had with a cheetah while on safari in Africa.
“I did have an incident and I sent you guys a little thing,” Sandler, 46, said of the clip. “This is a true story. I went there and they let me in with a cheetah and said I could feed the cheetah water with my hands. So, I did it and it went a little bit wrong.”
In the video clip, Sandler kneels down to scoop up some water from a pond, but the cheetah jumps up behind him on his back. The trainer quickly pulled the cheetah off Sandler and he then slowly stood up.
“You were remarkably composed,” the late night host commented.
“Yeah, I played it off real good,” Sandler joked. “What happened was they said you’re not supposed to bend down low with the water.”
“I was very nervous,” the actor admitted. “It was fast.”
But there was another reason why the Grown Ups 2 star looked so calm in the video. “The only reason I didn’t react . . . [was that] I had a stiff neck at the time. So when he jumped on me, I was like, ‘Oh my neck,'” he joked. “All I was going to do was let him eat me. There was not one part of me that was going to fight back. I was like, ‘Alright, this is how I’m dying. This is great!'”
