Magician David Blaine reveals new stunts for Las Vegas show

Superstar magician David Blaine, naturally, does not have vacation photos like the rest of us.

Sitting at a table in his lower Manhattan magic lab — a secret lair on the edge of Chinatown where the 50-year-old develops his tricks and stunts — Blaine showed The Post footage from a trip to Southeast Asia

Video reveals him breaking bottles over his head, getting buried in scorpions and eating red hot coals. Then it cuts to Blaine making a move to kiss a king cobra: a snake with venom so deadly that a single bite could kill him in just 15 minutes.

“The venom is potent enough to kill an elephant,” Blaine told The Post.

“I worked with an expert [reptile handler] named Fiitz, in Indonesia, who keeps the snakes. He had one that had been rescued from a community where it was a nuisance. Another had killed a man,” Blaine told The Post.

“Kissing a king cobra’s head is the most dangerous stunt I’ve ever attempted. Get bit by a cobra and you will not be unscathed.”

While paramedics and an ambulance were on hand, Blaine said, the nearest hospital was 20 minutes away. 

And anti-venom is not guaranteed to work.

“I had to keep my heart rate down. If they sense fear or trouble, king cobras react by attacking,” he added. “Any time I got tense, I walked away.”

Stunts like these will be part of an upcoming National Geographic TV series being produced by Imagine Entertainment.

“I’m searching all over the world for people who do things that seem impossible and then I’m attempting to learn how to do those things myself,” Blaine said. “In figuring out difficult feats I would do, the producer suggested skydiving and things that sounded fun. I told him I want to do what makes me immediately uncomfortable.”

That’s how he wound up meeting with an Indian street performer who sets his head on fire and a grandmother who eats real razor blades.

“She does it to show her strength,” said Blaine. “I was surprised by the limits people are willing to push.”

Blaine was up for attempting many of the feats — but there was one he steered clear of: “I met a guy in India who pushed skewers and hooks through his torso. My doctor advised me against it.”

The project, which he described as “magical but not magic,” is in addition to a new live show, “IMpossible,” he will premiere at the Encore Theater in Wynn Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve weekend.

Directed by David Korins, who was creative director of the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” this one replaces Blaine’s previous gig at Resorts World in Vegas.

For the Wynn show, the illusionist promises more intimacy and audience participation — “The ‘IM,’” Blaine explained, “stands for ‘Interactive Magic’” — as audience members will receive decks of cards to be used in the final trick.

But the show is also a magic-loaded narrative that tells Blaine’s personal story.

“The performance is going to provide insights into the people who inspired me. I’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants who had unique skills that haven’t been seen in more than 100 years,” he said.

He gestured across the room to a vintage poster featuring Mac Norton: “He’s the magician who turned himself into a human aquarium and brought living creatures out of his mouth on command.”

Blaine pulled off his own version on “The Tonight Show” in 2022, suddenly spitting a live frog out of his mouth and causing host Jimmy Fallon to flop onto the floor in shock.

The Resorts World show, which ran from September 2022 until June 2023, began with Blaine jumping from a shaky lighting truss nine stories in the air onto a bed of empty cardboard boxes put into place by audience members.

The casino’s high-ceilinged showroom is what drew him to perform there in the first place.

“I was obsessed with the fall,” Blaine said. “I was so taken by the fact that I could start the show by jumping from nine stories up and going directly into the audience.”

It was a great opener — until it wasn’t.

“I had just gotten back from Thailand and was recovering from scorpion stings,” he said. “Between the venom and the antibiotics I had to take, my body was not completely balanced.”

One night in March, he jumped and landed incorrectly, dislocating his shoulder.

Crew members tried convincing Blaine to end the show and go to a hospital, but he refused.

Backstage, his friend and fellow magician Doug McKenzie was Googling how to pop a shoulder back into place.

Fortunately, there was a convention of orthopedic doctors in town and five of the specialists happened to be at the show.

One of them pushed his shoulder back in.

It popped out again, and Blaine wound up finishing the performance with audience members taking turns holding the injured arm while he did magic with the good one.

“I’m lucky the injury was to my shoulder and not to my neck. Now the jump is off,” he said, because of his 12-year-old daughter, Dessa. “I promised my daughter that I wouldn’t do it it again in my show.”

The accident had an impact on Blaine’s global pursuit of danger.

In Brazil, he followed the lead of a pyrotechnics performer, learning to set his entire body on fire and extinguishing it by jumping from a 64-foot bridge into a canal off the Atlantic Ocean.

“I was still recovering from the shoulder injury,” he said. “Ideally you want to dive, so that the fire goes behind you. But I needed to jump feet first. I had protective gels on me, and I had to cover my face. You learn quickly when you do these things.”

One dangerous trick he will be bringing to the Wynn: An audience member chooses three Styrofoam cups, one of which has an icepick inside it.

Blinded — his eyes covered with silver dollars and duct tape — and guided by the same crowd member, Blaine slams his hand through two of three upside down cups.

But it all went wrong during one of his Resorts World performances. 

“I wasn’t sure where [the icepick] was and I didn’t want to delay the show,” said Blaine, who smashed his hand right onto the icepick. “I had an idea on some level. Lots of magicians mess themselves up on this thing. I bled everywhere. I went off stage for 40 seconds, cleaned the blood and came back out. That won’t stop me from performing it at the Wynn.”

He’ll also do an upside-down, underwater breath-hold, sometimes staying submerged for 10 minutes.

How does he do it? “I accept the pain.”

Still, it begs the question of how much longer Blaine can do the extreme stunts.

“Those things are not what I should be doing at this age,” he admitted. “Houdini pushed his body until he was 52. Then he collapsed when coming out of the tank [of water]. He was rushed to the hospital and died soon after [of peritonitis].

“You reach a point where you can’t push your body anymore. I don’t want to go past Houdini’s age [doing dangerous stunts]. The irony is that most people just like the magic. But combining stunts with magic allows the audience to suspend disbelief.”

And the mind-blowingly unbelievable is what Blaine traffics in — who can forget him living in a block of ice for nearly 64 hours, being electrified with Tesla coils while standing atop a 22-foot-tall pillar or floating nearly 25,000 feet into the air by holding onto balloons?

“There will be so many dangerous things at the Wynn,” Blaine said, ticking off the swallowing of a metal coat hanger, spitting fire and trying to avoid the ice pick. “This show can abruptly end at any time. I like that.”