» Extreme magician David Blaine reveals the one thing he won’t attempt

Who wants to see David Blaine smash a bottle on his skull? Warning: this is not a trick. Something about the grim, palpably reluctant way he practises swinging it — more like a deadly bludgeon than the lightweight fakes in cowboy movies — makes for a sickening few moments of television.

Then, magically, his phone rings.

“My daughter, yeah,” he says with a helpless dad’s grin, recalling the moment months later from a hotel room in Los Angeles. “That was a hard stop. As soon as she called at that exact moment I said, ‘You know what? That’s a sign’ … The risk wasn’t worth it,” he decided, “but then … I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

When 12-year-old Dessa called, her famous magician/mentalist father was on location in India for his National Geographic series, Do Not Attempt. It’s a show that earns its safety warning every 10 minutes as Blaine travels the world seeking feats of terrifying skill, danger and endurance to marvel and often have a crack at.

“Do Not Attempt is the exploration part of what I do,” says the man best known for holding his breath underwater for 17 minutes on Oprah, or being buried alive for a week in New York, or starving for 44 days in a box suspended over the River Thames, or at very least for blowing the minds of celebrities and regular folks alike with card tricks of astounding dexterity.

“Normally, I search the world for fascinating people to find inspiration to combine real things with magic. That’s what I consider to be magical: when something has been practised, rehearsed, to the extent that it looks like magic because you don’t think there’s a possible way to actually do it.

“Normally, you see me do a magic trick, and then you see the reaction, but you rarely see the part of the process that I’m most excited about, which is constantly being a student; constantly pushing myself to places that I am uncomfortable.”

As the six-part series unfolds, we can only relate in horror as we’re led through myriad encounters with remarkable people from India to the Arctic Circle, Japan to South Africa and South-East Asia to Brazil.

From leaping off 40-metre cliffs into tiny, ice-covered fjords to lying deathly still under hundreds of giant venomous forest scorpions, the thread is overcoming fear and pain through inconceivable discipline and application.

“I think the most dangerous thing that I did was sitting in that small enclosure with the six black mambas [in South Africa]. That was the riskiest thing,” Blaine says. “One scratch from these unpredictable, wild mambas and that’s the end.

“I was sitting with somebody [snake rescuer Neville Wolmarans] whose whole point is to show that you don’t need to kill them. You can just stay still, and they’ll lose interest … But at the same time, he was missing a leg, his hand didn’t work properly, and he had gone into a coma two times from snake injury. So it was pretty intense.”

Blaine’s own motivation for mastering acts of apparent magical transcendence began when he was very small, “discovering Houdini, who was doing real things combined with magic. And then the guys you’d see on Coney Island, the sword swallowers and … that began my curiosity with ‘Wait, how is that possible?’”

In his recent book, Mysterious Stranger, Blaine describes using card tricks he learnt on the mean streets of Brooklyn to make his mother smile. Patrice White was a single mum who died from cancer when he was a teenager. He still idolises her. In his book, he quotes the US-Israeli writer Mark Helprin to describe his education: “He was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between a parent and child.”

Which leads us back to Dessa, his child with French model Alizee Guinochet. Surely, her arrival in 2011 made him recalibrate what some might consider a somewhat cavalier attitude to serious injury and death?

“It changed everything,” he says. “When she was one, I did my last stunt. I was in a field of electricity for 73 hours [on top of a seven-metre pillar in New York], and at the end, I suffered. It was so risky that I said, ‘I’m never gonna do something like that again’.”

He waves away the suggestion that most people’s definition of “stunt” might include free diving long distances without a wetsuit under metre-thick Finnish ice, then punching his way out. Or setting himself on fire and leaping off a 22-metre-high Brazilian road bridge.

“Oh, these things that you’re seeing [in this series] were mini stunts,” he says. “It’s not like a year or two of, ‘How do I to put this thing together?’” These were … learning from the experts, and they’re sharing their skills, and if I feel like I can trust them, then I go forward with it.”

Naturally, in the India episode, Blaine can’t help returning to the world’s expert in smashing bottles over your head, Deepak Mandal, for another crack at his skull. And spoiler alert: it does not end especially well.

“It just grew in my mind,” Blaine says, “trying to understand how it could be done the way Deepak does it — even though he has so much experience, and his guru showed him the method, and he trusts his guru, so he just immediately was able to do it.

“But I was happy that when I did do it, there was that injury because I don’t want anybody to think they could do that. That one, specifically, is the one that led to the title Do Not Attempt. I suddenly started fearing, what if somebody thinks, ‘Oh, this looks easy’?”

As the series progresses, it’s curious to see the things that Blaine will and will not attempt. At a favela in Brazil, he meets street performer Arteval Duarte, a snake handler who inserts needles under his fingernails from tip to quick. “That’s an example of something I tried to do and I could not do it,” Blaine says. “Nope.”

But setting yourself on fire and jumping off a bridge, no problem?

“That’s … absolutely accurate.”

So all accumulated injuries considered, would he be pleased to see his daughter carry on the family business?

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“I’m pleased with anything that she does. I’m so proud of her, and I’m amazed by her at all times. I’m mostly excited because everybody says to me, ‘She’s so polite, she’s so kind’, and that’s the number one greatest thing to hear. I also see her ability to focus, to work, to train, and the respect she has for whatever work is presented to her. So she inspires me.”

Yeah, but if she set herself on fire and jumped from an aeroplane with a shark? “Ohhh! I mean, no. That would be tough.”

Do Not Attempt premieres on Disney+ on March 24.

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