SHARK WEEK’s ULTIMATE SHARK DIVE premieres on Discovery Channel and its streaming platforms on Thursday, July 30. The documentary pairs professional cliff diver Molly Carlson with shark expert Paul de Gelder for a segment set in the Bahamas.
Here, Carlson performs the highest freefall dive in SHARK WEEK history, leaping from a helicopter fifty feet down into a Plexiglas cage situated in a reef populated by multiple types of sharks.
Carlson gets on Zoom to discuss her adventure. She is wearing a Red Bull baseball cap for the occasion, in honor of her frequent work with the energy drink brand, which frequently collaborates with SHARK WEEK.
Becoming a professional diver has been Carlson’s goal from an early age. She was a Youth Olympian and then came in fourth for the Canadian team for the 2016 Olympics. Unfortunately, only the top two get to go.
After that, Carlson relates, “I decided to go to Florida State University and do a diving scholarship. I absolutely loved it. And then I switched over to high diving after my four years at FSU.”
Carlson describes being approached to do a segment of SHARK WEEK as “a pretty special moment. I’ve always had this fear of sharks, and Red Bull and Discovery always have these insane ideas, and they came to me together and said, ‘Would you ever by chance jump into a shark cage?’
Kendyl Berna in a shark cage in SHARK WEEK : ULTIMATE SHARK DIVE | ©2026 Discovery Channel
“My first thought was, ‘Absolutely not. What is this conversation? I’m terrified of sharks.’ And then, the more I thought about it, I was like, ‘This could be such a cool opportunity to just face fears head on and to see what I could do.’ I didn’t expect to attempt a world’s first out of it, so yeah. I can’t believe how it all went down.”
Was there greater danger from sharks that were swarming and might possibly become agitated by the sudden appearance of a human in their midst, or from the possibility of hitting the edge of the cage?
“I one hundred percent thought that the sharks would be the greater danger, but the team that Discovery paired me with [had] so many professionals in one spot that I had this weird confidence that I would be okay around the sharks.
“I was the only cliff-diving professional on the trip, and I had to be super-locked in. Luckily, when I sent in the measurements for the cage, I made it extra-big to make sure that I had very minimal chance of hitting the cage, because obviously, that is detrimental. For me, it was important to have enough risk, while still making a cage not the size of a little laptop screen, so I could land on it. So, it was definitely the perfect size to have a little bit of danger, but yeah, it definitely looked small from up in that helicopter.”
Carlson explains that, at fifty feet, there is almost no danger of knocking herself out on impact with the water. She typically dives from cliffs at a height of twenty meters, or approximately sixty-six feet.
“I decided to pick the fifteen-meter height, because I’m super-comfortable with it. I’ve never seen any knockouts off this height, and so, for me, it was just like, with all the variables – the moving ocean, the moving cage, the moving helicopter – I wanted just to pick a height that felt comfortable to me, so no matter how I landed in the water, I knew that I could swim out of it, sharks or not, so it was just the perfect height to play on, you could say.”
Carlson was briefed on what types of sharks would likely be in the vicinity, and that she’d also have experts in the water to help her. “In the Bahamas, they knew there’s be somebody between me and the reef sharks, as well as nurse sharks. So, when I got to go down there, I saw a few species, which was really cool. No Great Whites, that’s for sure – thank goodness. No bull sharks. I was very happy about that, They scare me, too,” she laughs.
What Carlson hopes viewers get out of ULTIMATE SHARK DIVE ties in with her own motives for making the leap. “I definitely struggle with my mental health, I live with anxiety every single day. And so, for me to have gone into such a scene with so much weird anxiety but learn how to just work through it and do it anyway, I hope people take away from this that fear is allowed to be there and you’re allowed to be scared, but that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve your dreams. So, that was really my mission on this project.”
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Article: Exclusive Interview: Professional cliff diver Molly Carlson talks about cage diving in ULTIMATE SHARK DIVE on SHARK WEEK
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