David Blaine shows his hand in Do Not Attempt
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.