William Chapman, ca. 2001 – 2026

What is it with all the weird deaths this week? Now it turns out the man killed inside a British lion’s enclosure on Oct. 10 was former child actor William Chapman, who was in his mid-20s. Chapman had appeared in the 2009 TV-movie May Contain Nuts, and a 2012 episode of the documentary BBC Learning: True Stories (playing vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner). A graduate of the Jackie Palmer Stage School, he climbed over the fences at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park’s tiger den, which one tiger—named Altai—did not take kindly. The video I saw on the news showed Chapman apparently bitch-slapping the tiger, and as you can imagine, it did not end well. Altai will not be euthanized, the Park emphasized. Government zoo expert Campbell Murn noted that “I view it in the same way a determined thief will get into somebody's house or somebody's car and despite the best security systems and enclosures sometimes these things happen.”