LUCKY TO BE ALIVE: Jake Wood had a close call with an alligator (Pic: GETTY)
The EastEnders actor was in a boat when his wife Alison decided to jump into the water and was confronted by the man-eating beast.
Jake and their two children Buster and Amber looked on in horror as they spotted the alligator heading in her direction.
They screamed at Alison to get out of the water as their trip to the Everglades in Florida almost turned to tragedy.
Jake, who plays Walford’s Max Branning, said: “I almost lost my wife to an alligator in Florida.
“We were out in a boat and she needed to get out. So, she was standing in the water about 15 feet away I see this thing floating down the river.
“So I’m looking at it and thinking: ‘It’s got to be a log or something. Got to be a log.’
“All of a sudden it f***ing goes down and I f***ing see an eye. All the kids are screaming, I’m screaming: ‘Get back in the boat!’
“As soon as an alligator goes underwater you don’t know where it is, it was horrible.
“It was only about 15 feet away.”
CLOSE CALL: Jake Wood had the Croc encounter with his wife and two kids (Pic: GETTY)
“All the kids are screaming, I’m screaming: ‘Get back in the boat!’”
Jake Wood
The actor, 46, said they only realised how lucky they had been when they returned their boat to the hire shop.
“We got back to the shop and I went: ‘By the way, when we were going round that corner my wife got out of the boat’,’ he said.
“He looked so shocked and he went: ‘I wouldn’t have got out of the boat. There’s that alligator there, he’s a maneater.'”
Jake’s encounter with the deadly creature happened in 2014 but he said its impact will always stay with his children.
SCARRED: Jake said the encounter will always stay with his children (Pic: GETTY)
He added: “Good story, although it did scar the kids for life. We were all screaming because we all saw it.
“It makes me squiffy just thinking about it.”
Jake isn’t the first celebrity to have a scary experience with an animal on holiday.
Pop star Shakira was attacked by a sea lion on a visit to Cape Town, South Africa, in 2012.
And Gordon Ramsay was once bitten on the nose by a puffin he was planning to cook in Iceland.
