begged

It’s been four years in the making, now a staggering ‘real life’ Lion King tells the story of how one cub makes it all the way to the top

When the makers of National Geographic’s Lion started out on their four-year mission to tell the story of a pride of lions in the Masai Mara, they did not think they get the real-life version of The Lion King.

But after 52 shoots over 1400 filming days in Kenya and 1,000 hours of footage, they ended up focusing on the journey undertaken by eight-week old male Kio – the first natural history series to follow a lion throughout their full journey from a tiny cub to a king.

The four-part series is the brainchild of The Lion King director Jon Favreau and BBC Studios executive producer Mike Gunton, and has a score by renowned composer Hans Zimmer. Series producer Jane Atkins said it had been a rollercoaster of emotion. “We poured so much love into the project, so I just hope that passion comes through with the way audiences receive it. We want to make films that transport people.”

Lions have a high infant mortality rate, with more than 50% not making it past their second year – and male lions are notoriously hard to follow because they are always wandering off. Jane initially thought the main story would be about a female matriarch but she soon knew that Kio, who was incredibly close to his experienced mother Summer, had potential to become the main star. “I knew it was risky, because of all the statistics, but I was backing that story quite early on. To not have a clue right at the beginning what our end story was going to be was terrifying. But we thought we must be bold, ambitious and able to shift if we don’t get the story that we want. We were playing a very kind of high-stakes gamble the whole time.”

Mike said that when he pitched the project to National Geographic all those years ago, he could only do so in the vaguest terms. “My pitch was not to tell the Lion King, it was to tell the story of a lion pride,” he explained. “None of us knew that it would end up being a male but relatively quickly this male started to stand out as a potential character. But you’d be foolish to just follow him. We were following some adult females, we were following many other lions but as time went on, he became more and more a key character.

“As time goes on, it gets increasingly risky, because you’ve invested more and more in that individual, both emotionally and in terms of footage. As you get closer and closer to the end – which is when you run out of time and money – every day, you think, please don’t die, please don’t die.”

Across the four episodes Kio not only loses important family members, he also loses his home. But over time he proves himself an equal among his older brothers, becoming strong enough to fight rival males and together he and the brotherhood take over a new pride of females, and finally take control of a new kingdom.

Jane said she has found the filming process pulled at the heartstrings in more ways than one. “We were so in love with the characters, by the end I felt really emotional, not just because I was so proud of the team, but also – this sounds strange – I was so proud of this little cub who had made it. He had become this incredible adult male, and it’s like seeing my 14-year-old son, over those years, kind of become a man.”

She said the male lions had to fight hard to succeed, which wasn’t always easy to watch. “You feel incredibly protective, so it is like having your own son, and having to sort of let go of them a little bit.” She could only relax after three and a half years of filming. “We lived and breathed every second of it,” she said. “Jon Favreau was so nervous, he’d say ‘every time you phone me, I feel like you’re about to say something terrible’. His first question was always, ‘is Kio alive?’

At one point, one of the big characters does die and director of photography Sophie Darlington had to overcome her grief to carry on filming. “The way she died was incredibly sad,” Jane said. “We had meetings straight away in the office, and people were crying and there was a lot of upset, and then we had to ask Sophie to go back out to film the aftermath of what happened on Kio and the boys.”

Mike told the Mirror that it was nerve-wracking to make a drama featuring a cast over which they had no control with one of the biggest challenges simply keeping tabs on them. “They’re not collared so we rely on the guides to find them. Every morning before dawn you’d go to where you saw them last, and hope they’re there. If they’re not you drive around and hope that you can find them.”

He said the only script was the one that “nature has written” and explained: “Our job is to just gather and pick the moments of relevant excitement.”

He said the skills of those on the ground were phenomenal. “You are spending 90% of the time with nothing, and then, bang, something will happen almost out of the blue. That’s why the skills of the trackers and the camera teams are extraordinary, they know it’s coming, they’ve got that sixth sense.”

One shocking storyline involves Kio’s mother. “Viewers are going to be shocked by Summer’s story,” Mike warns. “We knew what happened, and it was an interesting filmmaking challenge, how you tell that story without the actual imagery. But you also have to be quite careful politically about how you frame that story.”

Mike found that while it was extremely challenging – it was also incredibly rewarding. “It’s been one of the most joyful things I’ve ever worked on. I say that because it all worked ou,” he laughed. “Imagine if after three and a half years they all died – I would probably be having a very different conversation.”

Mike, who works on many of the David Attenborough series for the BBC, added: “I know epic gets overused, but it does feel, genuinely, like an epic story. I think it’s a real privilege to do something that is this epic.”

In order to know precisely what they were filming, the team gave each lion its own identification card and quickly becoming expert at identifying up to 50 lions from different prides by name and family relationships.

The four episodes will be voiced by actor OJ Lynch – because Favreau wanted the series to use a “storyteller’s voice,” as if the audience was sitting around a campfire with an elder. Lynch previously played Mufasa in the West End version of The Lion King – and also used to work at BBC Studios’ Natural History Unit. “I knew him when he was a postboy about 40 years ago,” Mike says. “I just thought his voice was fantastic. I wanted a voice that wasn’t a famous voice but could be anybody from that part of the world, and Jon felt the same. We felt this was a story that could have been told at any time – 10 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago. It’s a story of all time.”

– Lion airs on National Geographic as a double bill from Thursday 20 August at 8pm and 9pm, and also streams on Disney +

MEGAN McKenna was violently attacked in her own home by three machete wielding thugs who tore her jewellery off her hand as she begged them not to kill her.

The three men left the TV star fleeing the UK for Germany with her now husband, Union Berlin footballer Oliver Burke.

Megan, who is mum to 22-month-old Landon, reveals she confronted the robbers after they used a baseball bat to break into her locked bedroom and pleaded with them to leave.

Speaking on Jamie Laing’s Good Company podcast, Megan said: “I was robbed really badly in my own home.”

The incident happened in 2024, with the men going on trial last year.

Opening up about the robbery, Megan said to sleep alone in her home in London while Oliver was away in Germany.

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Megan, 33, explained: “I must have fallen asleep within the first 15 minutes.

“I woke up to my whole house shaking. I was such a disorientated mess.

“They were inside my house, but I lock my bedroom door every night because I always worry about something happening to me when I’m on my own.

“The next thing I know, my mirror has come off my wall, and they’re hacking a hole through my wall with a baseball bat.

“They’re three masked men with machetes and baseball bats, and they managed to hack a hole in my wall because it was a fake wall going onto my dressing room, linked to my bedroom

“ And if my door wasn’t locked, actually, they probably would have woken me up and probably killed my dog.”

Megan immediately called the police who told her not to speak to the masked raiders.

But fearing for her dog, Megan said she confronted them.

She added: I went over to them. I was naked.

“I was talking to this man in a balaclava, and he grabbed my hand and he took jewelry off of me.

“Like I actually was holding hands with the robber, and they had a conversation outside the wall, and they made a phone call.

“I was shaking. I’d cut my foot. There was blood everywhere. It was like a bloody murder scene.

“And then I’m standing naked, and they just left with nothing, with nothing else.”

Megan said she believes the men had always planned to attack her.

She said: “It was obviously targeted.

“[The police] wanted me to go on trial.

“And I just said to them, like, I actually can’t physically do that. Go through it.”

Despite the men being jailed, Megan said she was horrified to learn they had been released not long after being locked up.

Megan explained: “They got caught, and then they went on trial, and then a year later, they just got let out.

“They’re just roaming the roads.”

Megan, who found fame on Towie and Celebrity Big Brother before pursuing a career as a singer, said she will now not stay in the UK alone.

She added: “It scared me so much to be in the UK and to live in the UK on my own, because obviously Ollie’s in Germany.”