In the glittery pantheon of 20th-century spectacle, few names dazzle or bewilder quite like Siegfried & Roy. More than mere magicians, the tiger-taming illusionists were postmodern pharaohs of the Vegas stage who transformed the Strip into their own mythic kingdom of smoke and sequins. Their show was like what you’d get if Liberace ran a zoo, their stagecraft a fever dream of rhinestones, pyrotechnics, and predators, where white tigers materialized out of mist while men in jumpsuits defied logic, gravity, and good taste.
Night after night, they conjured a world where danger was elegant and illusion was king.
In 2022, Apple took a stab at unpacking the pair’s mythos with its original podcast Wild Things: Siegfried & Roy, the first in-depth podcast exploration of the widely misunderstood and frequently satirized showmen. Apple TV+, meanwhile, is planning to take that story even further, with an adaptation of the Wild Things podcast in the form of an eight-episode drama from Only Murders in the Building co-creator John Hoffman.
The upcoming series Wild Things, for which production is set to begin this fall, will star Jude Law and Andrew Garfield as the German-born illusionists who put on their final performance at the Las Vegas Mirage more than 20 years ago — the one that was cut short when a 400-pound white tiger named Montecore sank its teeth into Roy’s neck and dragged him offstage.
The series coming to Apple’s streamer will chronicle both the highs and lows of the saga that surrounded Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, two men who bonded over a shared obsession with magic and exotic animals after meeting aboard a German cruise ship in the late 1950s. What began as a shipboard spark would soon evolve into one of the most outlandish and iconic double acts in showbiz history, and by the 1970s, they’d become icons of the pre-internet era.
The spell they conjured finally cracked in 2003, during the shocking incident with the tiger that bit Roy — effectively ending the duo’s career and launching a decade of rumors, rewrites, and retroactive mythologizing.
Apple’s Wild Things podcast peeled back the velvet curtain to examine how Siegfried & Roy built an empire, protected its secrets, and maintained the illusion even when the fantasy began to fracture. Narrated by Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Steven Leckart, that series hinted at a deeper enigma: Were they just eccentric entertainers? Or were they among the last of a dying breed — showmen who insisted magic still existed in a world that wanted to explain everything?
The Apple TV+ adaptation looks to continue that excavation of the Siegfried & Roy story. With Law and Garfield not only starring but also executive producing, as well as Hoffman at the helm, Wild Things is shaping up to be more than just a biopic. It promises a psychological deep dive into celebrity, control, delusion, and the cost of maintaining a kingdom that’s built on smoke and mirrors.
