Jonah Hill nearly drowned in Australia

Jonah Hill admits he nearly drowned during a visit to Australia.

Jonah Hill thought he was going to die during a near-drowning incident in Australia.

The This Is the End star got caught in a riptide and was dragged out to sea while swimming with his 21 Jump Street co-star Channing Tatum on Bondi Beach in Sydney after a long boozy flight last year.

The 29-year-old actor told Conan O'Brien on his late night chat show: "We got off the plane and immediately we're like, 'Let's go swimming!' and so we go to Bondi Beach... and there's such a bad riptide there that dumb tourists get off the plane and go swimming and drown, and get rescued.

"We go in the ocean and I start swimming and then what feels like a second later I look back and Chan's (Tatum) about a mile away from me ... He's, like, by the beach taking pictures with people and I'm literally, like, head bobbing out, like, 'What's going on? Where am I?'

"I start to swim as hard as I can and I'm not going anywhere and so I'm like, 'This is how I die...' I am a guy who died in the ocean in Australia ... wasted.

"Finally a guy comes out on a jet-ski and he's like, 'Hey mate, we gotta pull you in; you can die out here!' He kinda pulls me in and then I start swimming and what's crazy is there was paparazzi on the beach. Rarely in life do you tell a story that sounds ridiculous and there's a picture that's even more ridiculous than the actual story.

"We're there for a week doing press and I open the newspaper and on the front page was, 'Jonah Hill, actor, almost drowns' and that picture is on the cover for all of Australia to see. Every interview we did started off with, 'Heard you went for a swim yesterday... Somebody needs to get some floaties'."

- Bang! Showbiz