It’s hard to believe David Blaine doesn’t have a death wish.
In a generation where most of us are desperately trying to prolong our lives by going organic, fat-free and decaf, Blaine is going face-to-face with mortality, instead.
“I think, if I had a death wish, I’d go do something like jump off of a bridge headfirst and see what happens, but this is not that,” he tells tabloid! over the phone. “This is years and years of research and practice and testing and studying and watching other people do individual feats, and then figuring out my own version of them and then making them mine.”
Let’s review the tapes, shall we? Blaine buried himself alive — yes, that’s six feet under — beneath a tank filled with more than three tons of water, for a whole week, in 1999. A year later, he trapped himself inside of an enormous ice cube in Times Square for 63 hours, escaping only with the help of chain saws and racing right to the hospital after. Three years later, he locked himself inside a transparent, suspended Plexiglas box in London for a staggering 44 days, surviving on a meek diet of 4.5 litres of water a day and no food whatsoever.
Fast forward to 2008, when he broke the Guinness World Record for “oxygen assisted static apnoea” on The Oprah Winfrey Show by holding his breath underwater for a terrifying 17 minutes, something that could cause serious brain damage if done incorrectly.
Now, the Houdini-inspired magician, illusionist and endurance artist is gearing up to debut his brand new show Real or Illusion in Abu Dhabi on August 21, running until August 23. He’ll be performing old and new death-defying stunts, something he says he’s never done back-to-back like this, all in one night.
“The consequences could be terrible,” he says, speaking in his signature nonchalant tone that suggests he’s sharing what he had for breakfast that morning, rather than discussing risks to his life. “Each [stunt] breaks you down further and further, so it’s an experiment; because I’ve never done all of them together like this, so. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The show’s title, Real or Illusion, might be deceiving. It’s all going to be real, according to Blaine, and he’ll even invite audience members to examine it up-close for themselves. He recommends that this reporter come down to watch the first or second show, as he has “no clue” if he will be able to actually make it to the last day. His priority is trying to figure out how not to go into cardiac arrest or have something happen on-stage. Plan B? “No back-up plan,” he says. “I’m going to put myself up there and see what happens. That’s the back-up plan.”
But at the back of his mind, the 41-year-old does have other things to worry about, like fatherhood (he has a three-year-old daughter, Dessa).
“It changes your outlook. You become slightly more cautious — but it’s still the same process of, ‘I can pull this off because I know what I’m doing, because I’ve rehearsed it and tried it.’ But the truth is, anything can go wrong,” he admits.
As for whether or not Dessa will grow up wanting to freeze herself in an ice cube for three days, or bury herself alive, Blaine has other ideas.
“No. Zero. No chance. I couldn’t deal with it. I almost have a heart attack when she slips on a swing in a park,” he says, laughing. “She already does [have a daredevil streak], actually. I took her to Euro Disney, one time. And she was three years old, so too young, but she was insisting on going on their fastest roller coaster. They let her go, even though she’s six inches too short, and when it was done, the first thing she said is, “Again!”
But she still has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to tackling the impossible like her father. Blaine’s motto is to “assume that everything is going to work out until it doesn’t”, and this was certainly the case during his 2006 attempt to hold his breath underwater for more than eight minutes and 58 seconds in order to break the world record at the time. He was shackled in order to make things more interesting for television viewers and had wasted too much energy attempting to escape his restraints, thus only making it up to the seven minute, 12 second mark before showing signs of distress and being pulled out.
“I practice long enough, hard enough, and the experimentations you see show me what can go wrong — and things do go wrong. But I still approach it with, ‘It’s going to go right next time — it needs to go right.’ Then it’s a numbers game — it’s a precision game.”
Despite years of research and practice, Blaine says it’s still out of your control when you’re “messing with the human body”.
“You think everything is fine, but there’s still a lot of people — like the alligator [guy], what’s his name? Steve Irwin. Everything’s fine, he’s messing with alligators in the wild and crocodiles in the wild, and then all of a sudden a sting ray kills him. So you just don’t know.”
With that in mind, has there ever been any lasting trauma or damage that extended beyond a short hospital visit after one of his stunts?
“We’ll see in Abu Dhabi,” Blaine says. “If I can pull this off, I can probably keep pulling things off.”
For tickets to David Blaine’s Abu Dhabi shows, head to ticketmaster.ae. Tickets range between Dh200 and Dh495, with premium tickets and offers sold out. Shows on all three nights begin at 7.30pm.
