Expendables star and licensed badass Jason Statham nearly drowned on the set of the movie’s third installment after the truck Statham was driving lost its brakes and plummeted 60 feet into the icy water of the Black Sea.

The crew was filming outside of Varna, Bulgaria, when the brakes failed on the 3-ton truck Statham was driving. In an interview with The Mirror, Statham’s co-star, Sylvester Stallone, said that luckily the doors on the truck had been removed before filming, allowing Statham to jump out of the truck just as it flew off the cliff and into the water.

Aside from doing a lot of his own stunts, Statham was a member of Britain’s National Diving Squad for 12 years and competed for England at the 1990 Commonwealth Games. Stallone is convinced that’s what saved him.

“If anyone else had been in that truck we would have been dead because we were all wearing heavy boots and gun belts,” Stallone told the Mirror. “[He] would have drowned. But because Jason is an Olympic-quality diver he got out of it.”

Here is Terry Crews’ account of what happened that day: