David Blaine Talks National Geographic Series, ‘Do Not Attempt’
David Blaine. The name evokes a slew of images; perhaps you’ll recall his 44-day residency in a glass box, suspended above the river Thames — a stunt that made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic — or maybe you watched in disbelief as the magician-slash-mentalist held his breath for a record-breaking 17 minutes (and four seconds). If these feats didn’t reach your feed, though, you might remember another of Blaine’s high-risk hobbies: killing a full 63 hours locked inside of an ice box (the stunt was cheekily called “Frozen in Time”), for example, or spending another 177 hours submerged underwater (for a 2008 performance titled “Drowned Alive”). No matter which scenario comes to mind, the point stands: everyone knows the work of David Blaine.
Yet few seem to know the other David Blaine — the person behind the tricks. In his past work, whether it’s a live show in Las Vegas or a self-produced special (they’re plentiful, from ABC’s Street Magic in 1997 to 2020’s The Magic Way), Blaine has remained perpetually poker-faced. Nearly three decades after his mainstream breakthrough, however, Blaine is ready to drop the act. With his latest effort, a six-part National Geographic series titled David Blaine: Do Not Attempt, the magician ditches his deadpan disposition to crack a smile and shed a tear.
“This is the first time that I didn’t control every aspect of [the production], so it was very awkward and uncomfortable for me to show this side,” Blaine laughs over Zoom. “Normally, I work for years to pull something off and then I show it. This is the opposite — the learning curve is very quick.”
Filmed over the course of three years, Do Not Attempt takes Blaine across five continents to film in nine countries, including layovers in 33 airports — this is no hasty farewell tour, to say the least. In spite of its extended production period, though, the show required quick thinking: Blaine’s international encounters introduce a slew of local performers, with each one offering an on-screen challenge for the seasoned stuntman. “It was something that I’m not used to doing, breaking the character of a magician and being a student,” Blaine admits. “But I love constantly being a student and learning; that’s what excites me.”
“[Takeru Kobayashi] said, ‘We’re kindred spirits.’ At that moment, I realized: everybody that I’ve met along the way — they are kindred spirits.”
David Blaine
Classrooms, as viewers soon discover, can take many forms. In the first episode, Blaine hops on a flight to Brazil, where he hits the city streets and looks on as performers seem to escape death. They swallow fire, escape locked chains, and skillfully hop through tiny hoops — which are encircled by a collection of blades, to heighten the stakes — as awestruck spectators bite their nails.
Another lesson involved an icy flight to the Arctic Circle, where frigid conditions helped (or forced) Blaine to adopt a new perspective. “It was amazing to highlight these things that most people don’t get to experience,” Blaine says. Trapped beneath a thick layer of ice, Blaine remembers staring up at the sky: “The world under three feet of ice… when you would look up, you’d just see the patterns. I mean, it’s almost otherworldly; it’s like staring into space. It’s hard to explain, but it’s just so beautiful and so touching. So, you almost forget that you’re in these extreme situations, because the beauty is so great and [the performers] really let us into their favourite places, their favourite hidden worlds.”
Thanks to a high-calibre camera crew (courtesy of National Geographic), each stunt becomes an artistic opportunity: visceral moments of shock, fear, and relief are immortalized in striking visuals. “We had these amazing DPs — the guys shooting it — they’re all artists, and they’re all so passionate,” Blaine says. “They’re so caring about every little beat.” It’s the stuff he used to dream of as a kid: exploring new continents and cultures, trying his hand at each trick he sees along the way.
To be fair, Do Not Attempt isn’t entirely new territory — Blaine’s resume is packed with boundary-pushing television. Since his debut, the performer has repositioned magic as an almost sociological discipline — the study of surprise. In fact, David Blaine: Street Magic — one of Blaine’s first on-screen performances — made waves for its fresh take on performance art. As critic Jon Racherbaumer wrote for the June 1997 issue of Magic Magazine, the show was “really about theatrical proxemics; about the show-within-a-show and the spontaneous, visceral reactions of people being astonished.” Taken in this context, the new series represents a natural progression. If Blaine’s early career was about inducing awe, Do Not Attempt is concerned with experiencing it.
“It was like starting from scratch and becoming a student all over again — undoing everything, breaking every comfort, and pushing myself — at this point, which is much older than when I started 30 years ago.”
David Blaine on filming “David Blaine: Do Not Attempt”
Bewilderment and disbelief abound as Blaine recalls a jaunt to Japan, where he met competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi for the series’ final episode. Describing the encounter, Blaine’s respect for his craft is clear as ever. “You think, ‘Oh, [Kobayashi is] just eating,’ but no, that’s not what’s going on. He’s actually learned how to expand his stomach: he would put six litres of water in his stomach and stretch it out so he has a capability to to put this amount of food that nobody — no scientist or doctor — would ever say as possible. They say you should die when you do that, but he’s figured it out,” Blaine gushes. “I looked at him as doing one of the things in magic that [I was] obsessed with for the majority of my childhood — just watching the human aquarium, the human fire hydrant — these people would use their bodies as props to create magic.”
As he shares stories, a tangible passion carries our conversation from one episode to the next. Blaine tells eye-popping tales of performers floating through the air in -50° temperatures, and laughs as he remembers wading through the water in pursuit of a 25-foot anaconda. “Suddenly, you’re just watching this beautiful act, and it’s unlike anything you could imagine. You’re not thinking about anything other than that specific moment,” Blaine explains. Seeing the snake, he adds, was “like staring into a mythological creature’s eyes — it was so compelling. It was amazing.”
“The trial and the error — the passion, the dedication, the failures, and then the continual ‘keep pushing forward’ through everything — makes it as amazing as it is to watch.”
David Blaine on “Do Not Attempt.”
Though it’s bursting at the seams with high-quality, edge-of-your-seat entertainment, the series evokes deep emotions in equal measure. Blaine describes a feeling of kinship and community with each performer. In Japan, for instance, one pivotal conversation cut right to the core of his work: “[Kobayashi] said, ‘We’re kindred spirits.’ At that moment, I realized: everybody that I’ve met along the way — they are kindred spirits,” Blaine remembers. “There is a drive and a passion; it is not the typical skills that you would work on. You can’t learn them. They’re passed down, they’re shared, they’re developed on their own. Because many of them are extremely dangerous, it’s rare that there’s a course on how to do this.”
Each stunt is drenched with determination — a common thread that links street performers in Brazil to snake charmers in Southeast Asia. Blaine speaks to the performers’ raw passion as he recounts his adventures in South Africa. In the country’s “thriving cultural heart,” Blaine got a firsthand look at ‘spinning’: a type of performance in which drivers hop behind the wheel of a car and “spin” the machine fast enough to appear out of control while simultaneously performing tricks for a live audience.
“These performers are doing things that are dangerous, that are death-defying, and they’ve turned it into this performance in the way a magician would think about it. It’s exciting. It’s unexpected,” Blaine says, pausing to pinch the air. “They’re literally spinning the car and stopping this close to my knee — and I knew it was gonna be perfect because I watched it and I trusted them. Throughout the entire series, that’s what we were finding.”
With three years of non-stop travel, Do Not Attempt would tire most of us out; Blaine, however, emerged entirely re-energized. “It was like starting from scratch and becoming a student all over again — undoing everything, breaking every comfort, and pushing myself — at this point, which is much older than when I started 30 years ago,” Blaine laughs.
These challenges brought staggering returns. While his curiosity never waned, Blaine credits the series for showing him a new side of the magic scene. “The trial and the error — the passion, the dedication, the failures, and then the continual ‘keep pushing forward’ through everything — makes it as amazing as it is to watch,” explains the star. “It was me breaking my fourth wall: [instead of] being a magician, suddenly, I’m the person watching the magician perform.”
As a student, Blaine tapped into his original, unbridled enthusiasm for performance. “It was exciting, learning from all of these masters, these little, little bits of what they do: what drives them, what compels them, and how they’ve converted their environment into this incredible playground to do these feats that, to me, seem like magic,” he says. “The magic — even with card tricks — it’s the invisible work; the thousands of hours. My magician friends […] they’re always working on the move, but when they present the move, you don’t see the move. It just looks like, ‘Wait, how was that possible?’ So that’s what I love.”
“Once you decide to commit to something in your head, go for it. You don’t second guess it. So, as soon as you make the decision like, ‘I’m gonna go for it,’ then you put everything you have into moving forward.”
David Blaine
Make no mistake; Blaine’s past experience was essential to his success on the show. The magician treats his brain like a muscle — he spent years cultivating courage, teaching himself tricks, and reinforcing self-confidence. “If I would’ve done this series before I had done the other stunts and trained other things throughout [my career], I would have probably killed myself. I would probably ended up dead,” Blaine says with signature deadpan delivery. Instead, Blaine attributes his survival to decades of long, carefully-crafted training regimes. To perfect a high dive, for example, the magician spent two years with coach Bob Brown; together, they increased the diving height by slight, two-foot increments with each attempt — a slow but steady approach that paid off.
“What [Brown] taught me — besides listen, learn, and follow instructions — is once you decide to commit to something in your head, go for it. You don’t second guess it. So, as soon as you make the decision like, ‘I’m gonna go for it,’ then you put everything you have into moving forward. It started with the jump training, where [Brown] would count one, two, three, go, and I would always go on ‘go.'”
He’s quick to add an addendum, however — the show is called David Blaine: Do Not Attempt for a reason. “I don’t want anybody to try any of these things, because lots of the secrets are passed down. They’re guarded, they’ve been worked out,” Blaine explains.
Thanks to an especially bloody incident in Indonesia, where he met “a grandmother that eats real razor blades,” Blaine learned this lesson the hard way. “She was inspired by Harry Houdini — he did a razor blade act, but he didn’t eat the blades. Houdini put them in his mouth and pretended to swallow; then, he’d take a string and he’d pulled them all out, strung together. Somehow, that inspired her and she realized that she could actually take razor blades, chew them, eat them, and swallow them. So you never know what inspired what — and when I tried it, I sliced my mouth up I was bleeding everywhere, but we didn’t put that in,” he finishes with a laugh.
Accidents aside, Blaine speaks with an undeniable gratitude. “It was emotional. It was amazing. It was laughter, it was crying, tears,” he says. “It’s been the greatest learning curve but also an incredible experience in a way that I never would have imagined.”
The first two episodes of David Blaine: Do Not Attempt are now streaming on Disney Plus.
