Recently, Luc Besson, the renowned French film director, screenwriter, and producer, widely known for movies such as Léon: The Professional, The Fifth Element, Nikita, and Taxi, shared an unusual childhood memory. He revealed that as a baby, he lived with a lion in a Paris apartment.
Besson recalled that when he was only eight months old, his family was temporarily caring for a lion. The story sounds like something straight out of a screenplay — but it actually happened. According to him, a friend of his father asked for a favor: “I need to leave for fifteen days, could you look after my lion?” His father simply replied, “Yes, no problem.” The problem was, however, that the lion’s owner never came back.
The animal moved into their tiny 11 m² apartment in the heart of Paris, where it lived with Besson and his father for several weeks — far longer than originally expected. Besson recalled: “My father used to take him out early in the morning to the square in front of the Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique, right across the street. He put him on a leash and walked him around, but all the dogs would run away.” During that time, baby Luc shared his daily life with the wild animal — and sometimes even his sleep. “I often slept in the lion’s basket,” he said.
This unusual coexistence eventually began to worry the neighbors, starting with the building’s concierge. The concerns grew as the lion’s weight climbed past 80 kilograms. Realizing he couldn’t keep the animal in the apartment forever, Besson’s father decided to find a solution. “He found someone from a circus, because he didn’t know what else to do,” the director explained. Looking back, Besson expressed regret about the lion’s fate: “Unfortunately, he ended up in a circus — that magnificent lion.”
As a side note, in February 2025, Luc Besson also voiced his outrage toward hunters who, as he reported, killed a deer on his property in Orne.
