David Blaine shows his hand in Do Not Attempt
NatGeo docuseries follows Blaine around the world to learn the secrets of ordinary people doing remarkable feats.
Magician David Blaine smiles while running his hand through a flame. Credit: National Geographic/Dana Hayes
Over the course of his long career, magician and endurance performer David Blaine has taken on all kinds of death-defying feats: catching a bullet in his teeth, fasting for 44 days, or holding his breath for a record-breaking 17 minutes and 4 seconds, to name a few. Viewers will get to see a different side of Blaine as he travels the world to meet kindred spirits from a wide range of cultures in David Blaine Do Not Attempt, a new six-episode docuseries from National Geographic.
(Some spoilers below.)
The series was shot over three calendar years (2022-2024) in nine different countries and features Blaine interacting with, and learning from, all manner of daredevils, athletes, street performers, and magicians. In Southeast Asia, for instance, he watches practitioners of an Indonesian martial art called Debus manipulate razor blades in their mouths and eat nails. (There is no trick to this, just conditioned endurance to pain, as Blaine discovers when he attempts to eat nails: his throat was sore for days.) He braves placing scorpions on his body, breaks a bottle with his head, and sets himself on fire in Brazil while jumping off a high bridge.
One of the elements that sets this series apart from Blaine’s previous magical specials is his willingness to be filmed practicing and training to do the various featured stunts, including early failed attempts. This makes him seem more vulnerable and immensely likable—even if it made him personally uncomfortable during filming.
David Blaine and Amandeep Singh prepare to break bottles with their fists. National Geographic
“I’ve always kept that part hidden,” Blaine told Ars. “Normally I work for a few years and I develop [a stunt] until I feel pretty good about it, and then I go and do the stunt and push myself as far as possible. But in this scenario, it was so many places, so many people, so many events, so many feats, so many things to learn so fast. So it was me in a way that I never liked to show myself: awkward and uncomfortable and screaming and laughing. It’s the things that as a magician, I always hide. As a magician, I try to be very monotone and let the audience react. For this series, I was the spectator to the magic, and it was, for me, very uncomfortable. But I was watching these amazing performers—what I consider to be magicians.”
Safety first
The task of keeping Blaine and the entire crew safe in what are unquestionably dangerous situations falls to safety expert Sebastian “Bas” Pot. “I joke that my title is Glorifed Nanny,” Pot told Ars. “I specialize in taking people to very remote locations where they want to do insane things. I have three basic rules: No one dies, everyone gets paid, and we all smile and laugh every day. If I achieve those three things, my job is done.” He deliberately keeps himself out of the shot; there is only one scene in Do Not Attempt where we see Pot’s face as he’s discussing the risks of a stunt with Blaine.
Blaine has always taken on risks, but because he has historically hidden his preparation from public view, viewers might not realize how cautious he really is. “What people tend to forget about guys like David is that they’re very calculated,” said Pot. The biggest difference between working with Blaine and other clients? “Normally I’ll do everything, I will never ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself,” said Pot. “David is taking huge risks, and there’s a lot that he does that I wouldn’t do.”
Like Blaine, Pot also emphasized the importance of repetition to safety. In addition, “A huge amount of it is keeping the calm on set, listening and observing and not getting caught up in the excitement of what’s going on,” he said. While he uses some basic technology for tasks like measuring wind speed, checking for concussion, or monitoring vital signs, for the most part keeping the set safe “is very much about switching off from the technology,” he said.
Ken Stornes leaps from a platform in a Norwegian death dive. National Geographic/Dana Hayes
And when everyone else on set is watching Blaine, “I’m looking outwards, because I’ve got enough eyes on him,” said Pot. There was only one bad accident during filming, involving a skydiving crew member during the Arctic Circle episode who suffered a spinal fracture after a bad landing. The crew member recuperated and was back in the wind tunnel practicing within a month.
This is the episode where Blaine attempts a Viking “death dive” into a snow drift under the tutelage of a Norwegian man named Ken Stornes, with one key difference: Stornes jumps from much greater heights. He also participates in a sky dive. But the episode mostly focuses on Blaine’s training with free divers under the ice to prepare for a stunt in which Blaine swims from one point under Finnish ice to another, pulling himself along with a rope while holding his breath. A large part of his motivation for attempting it was his failed 2006 “Drowned Alive” seven-day stunt in front of Lincoln Center in New York. (He sustained liver and kidney damage as a result.)
“One of my favorite quotes is Churchill, when he says, ‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next failure with enthusiasm,'” said Blaine. “That’s what this entire series is. It’s these incredible artists and performers and conservationists and people that do these incredible feats, but it’s the thousands of hours of work, training, failure, repeat that you don’t see that makes what they do seem magical. There’s no guidebook for what they’re doing. But they’ve developed these things to the point that when I was watching them, I’m crying with joy. I can’t believe that what I’m seeing is really happening in front of my eyes. It is magical. And it’s because of the amount of repetition, work, failure, repeat that they put in behind the curtain that you don’t see.”
This time, Blaine succeeded. “It was an incredible experience with these artists that have taken this harsh environment and turned it into a wonderland,” said Blaine of his Arctic experience. “The free divers go under three and a half feet of ice, hold their breath. There’s no way out. They have to find the exit point.”
“When you stop and look, you forget that you’re in this extreme environment and suddenly it’s the most beautiful surroundings, unlike anything that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It’s almost like being in outer space. And when you’re in that extreme and dangerous situation, there’s this camaraderie, they’re all in it together. At the same time, they’re all very alert. There’s no distractions. Nobody’s thinking about messages, phones, bills. Everybody’s right there in that moment. And you’re very aware of everything around you in a way that normally in the real world doesn’t exist.”
Blaine admits that his attitude toward risk has changed somewhat with age. “I’m older and I have a daughter, and therefore I don’t want to do something where, oh, it went wrong and it’s the worst-case scenario,” he said. “So I have been very careful. If something seemed like the risk wasn’t worth it, I backed away. For some of these things, I would just have to watch, study, learn, take time off, come back. I wouldn’t do it unless I felt that the master who was sharing their skillset with me felt that I could pull it off. There was a trust, and I was able to listen and follow exactly. That ability to listen to directions and commit to something is a very necessary part to pulling something off like this.”
Granted, he didn’t always listen. When he deliberately attracted a swarm of bees to make a “bee beard,” he was advised to wear a white T-shirt to avoid getting stung. But black is Blaine’s signature color, and he decided to stick with it. He did indeed get stung about a dozen times but took the pain in stride. “He takes responsibility for him,” Pot (who is a beekeeper) said of that decision. “I’d tell a crew member to go change their T-shirt and they would.”
The dedication to proper preparation and training is evident throughout Do Not Attempt, but particularly in the Southeast Asia-centric episode where Blaine attempts to kiss a venomous King Cobra—what Pot considers to be the most dangerous stunt in the series. “The one person I’ve ever had die was a snake expert in Venezuela years ago, who got bitten by his own snake because he chose not to follow the safety protocols we had put in place,” said Pot.
Kissing a cobra
So there were weeks of preparation before Blaine even attempted the stunt, guided by an Indonesian Debus practitioner named Fiitz, who can read the creatures’ body language so effortlessly he seems to be dancing with the snakes. (Note: no animals were harmed over the course of filming.) The final shot (see clip below) took 10 days to film. Antivenom was naturally on hand, but while antivenom might save your life if you’re bitten by a King Cobra, “the journey you’re going to go on will be hell,” Pol said. “You can still have massive necrosis, lose a limb, it might take weeks—there’s no guarantees at all [for recovery].” And administering antivenom can induce cardiac shock if it’s not done correctly. “You don’t want some random set medic reading instructions off Google on how to give antivenom” said Pot.
David Blaine kisses a King Cobra with the expert guidance of Debus practitioner Fiitz.
Blaine’s genuine appreciation for the many performers he encounters in his journey is evident in every frame. “[The experience] changed me in a way that you can’t simply explain,” Blaine said. “It was incredible to discover these kindred spirits all around the world, people who had these amazing passions. Many of them had to go against what everybody said was possible. Many of them had to fail, repeat, embarrass themselves, risk everything, and learn. That was one of the greatest experiences: discovering this unification of all these people from all different parts of the world that I felt had that theme in common. It was nice to be there firsthand, getting a glimpse into their world or seeing what drives them.”
“The other part that was really special: I became a person that gets to watch real magic happening in front of my eyes,” Blaine continued. “When I’m up in the sky watching [a skydiver named] Inka, I’m actually crying tears of joy because it’s so compelling and so beautiful. So many of these places around the world had these amazing performers. Across the board, each place, every continent, every person, every performer has given me a gift that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.”
David Blaine Do Not Attempt premieres tonight on National Geographic and starts streaming tomorrow on Disney+ and Hulu.
Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.
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