Don’t expect a speedy renewal of David Blaine: Do Not Attempt – at least until the title star has a chance to fully recover.

“I can’t ever do this again. I’ll, like, die,” the title star joked at an event in New York to promote the six-part National Geographic series.

Blending magic with travel and cultural exploration, the series pairs Blaine with magicians from around the world. He learns to master feats ranging from the “Norwegian Death Dive” to kissing the head of a cobra. Production lasted for nearly three years.

Produced by Imagine Documentaries, the series bows Sunday on linear Nat Geo before a next-day streaming premiere on Disney+ and Hulu. Shot in Brazil, South Africa, Southeast Asia, the Arctic Circle, India and Japan, the series is not for the squeamish. (Check out the trailer HERE.) The camera lingers on Blaine as he inserts a six-inch knife fully into his nasal cavity, smashes glass bottles over his head, wears a beard of thousands of live bees and is covered head to toe with scorpions.

A panel discussion Thursday at Disney’s gleaming New York headquarters building, which opened late last year, also featured numerous clips. Blaine said the series honors his life-long idol, Harry Houdini.

“He would do things that no other magician would do,” Blaine said. “That led me down a path of looking for people who would do real feats that look like magic as opposed to just illusions. That was really compelling to me because the secrets are more shocking and revealing and intense than the actual trick that you’re seeing.”

The performers featured in each episode are “doing things that nobody should do,” Blaine said. “They are dangerous. There is no guidebook.” In coming up with the venues, personalities and feats to be featured in each episode, Blaine channeled Houdini by encouraging the production team to come up with out-of-the-box challenges. “I want them to be so scary that you don’t even want to tell me about it,” he recalled saying.

Bengt Anderson, executive producer of the series and SVP of production at National Geographic, noted that it wasn’t a guerilla production. “For a company like Disney, this wasn’t easy,” he dryly observed.

Medical personnel and resources, the producers told Deadline after the panel, were always on set, just out of view of the cameras. For the India episode involving acutely venomous cobras, the production needed to be sure to stay within a half-hour’s drive from the hospital, setting up a potential race against time given that anti-venom cannot be administered in any other setting. “If the snake had even just brushed him, it could still deliver enough venom to kill an elephant,” executive producer Chris St. John said.

For viewers who have become accustomed to Blaine’s magic and stunts, the series presents him in a different light. Anthony Bourdain’s influence, already widely felt across the unscripted programming world, is evident in David Blaine: Do Not Attempt.

“In this show, you see him as a student,” Anderson said of Blaine. “You see him as a curious explorer learning from other people and trying to find where magic exists out in the world.”