Ever since David Blaine was a kid, he was obsessed with a guy who was nicknamed the human fire hydrant. Since there was no YouTube, Blaine would spend hours at a broadcasting museum to watch old clips of the infamous trickster who could drink kerosene, spit it out and ignite an “enormous fire like a human dragon.”
No matter how many glasses of liquid he consumed, however, Blaine couldn’t quite figure out how the human fire hydrant performed his feat of magic. So in 2013, Blaine decided to go to the source and learn firsthand how to perform the fiery trick. That successful quest — yep, Blaine can spit flames with the best of ’em now — was the basis for David Blaine Do Not Attempt, a six-part documentary series for Nat Geo that explores the world through the lens of magic.
Blaine traveled the world to find ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Along the way, he learns a few tricks for himself — like how to charm a King cobra, or what it’s like to swim with an anaconda, or stuff a serrated knife down his nose.
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“This pursuit of doing things with your body, pushing as hard as you can, and then going even further to develop one skill that takes thousands and thousands of hours to learn … these are the incredible people that we see,” Blaine said during a conversation at Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary, Unscripted & Variety event of his visits to Brazil, India, South Africa and more. “It’s like the invisible work they put in to create that one fleeting moment of astonishment. To me, that’s the real magic, and that’s what I find beautiful. This was a search for that.”
“Along the way we discovered all the things that led to what they do, their driving forces,” Blaine continues. “They use the extreme cold, they do things that should not be possible under five feet of ice where they’re walking upside down and holding their breath. They use their extreme environments to create the closest thing to magic that I consider possible.”
That includes planting a big buss on the head of a King cobra. To pull off the ultimate trick, Blaine relied on a veritable snake charmer named Fitz whom he met in Indonesia.
“He’s been actually working with King cobras and snakes for 20 years now,” recalls Blaine. “He showed me his lifestyle, and he started to teach me how to feel comfortable around venomous snakes. He is a master at what he does. So I was very tuned into everything that he had told me and I processed it and I did it at my speed. So it was baby steps, but he shared everything with me and made me very comfortable. It was probably the most unpredictable and scariest moment in my career because in my mind if anything went wrong, that would probably lead to at best a very long hospital visit.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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