If You Think Cecil the Lion’s Killer Was the Worst Big-Game Hunter/Dentist, Meet Larry Rudolph on Hulu

Dateline had its shot at the perfect title for a December 2022 episode, but it missed the mark. Dani Sloane did not make the same mistake with her directorial debut, Trophy Wife, now on Hulu. She hit the bull’s-eye.

On Dec. 2, 2022, the NBC newsmagazine program tackled the crazy true story of dentist Larry Rudolph, who in 2016 murdered his longtime wife — fellow accomplished big-game hunter Bianca Rudolph — while on safari in Zambia. (Yes, this is a different American dentist/hunter than the one who killed Cecil the Lion just a year earlier in the neighboring African country of Zimbabwe.)

The Dateline episode was meh-titled “Safari Story,” leaving the perfect one for Sloane to claim. “Trophy wife” is like bagging a 24-point buck, and it was right there — so much so that in 2024, The Hollywood Reporter’s own James Hibberd called out Dateline correspondents Keith Morrison, Andrea Canning and Josh Mankiewicz on their episodic-title miss. Great minds and all of that.

Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari itself, from ABC News, is also quite good. Sloane got great gets for her turn at the tale, including the mistress herself, Lori Milliron, straight from prison. And then THR got Sloane.

Read our Q&A below; all three episodes of Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari are now available on Hulu.

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This feels like a perfect Netflix docuseries to me, but it ended up on Hulu by way of ABC News — how do you feel about where it ended up?

We’re all living through this age where the streamers are merging and unmerging and the landscape is just changing so swiftly and so quickly … I think the biggest thing was we needed partners who felt like they were bought into what the vision was, because we were trying to do something a little bit different and a little bit, dare I say, campy and a little bit funny and wacky and absurd. And I do think like you’re seeing — there’s such a shift in the landscape in terms of big IP stories being the ones that dominate, and so some of these, like, lesser-known crime stories are having a hard time finding a home, because they’re not the kind of quote-unquote “sure things.” For me it was more about finding partners that really felt like they got what we were doing and where we were going with it. And we really felt like we had that in ABC News Studios. All the way through they were really awesome to us.

You have a really strong true-crime résumé as a producer, but this is your directorial debut — why make that jump now with this story?

It was always a dream of mine to get to this place. I have been showrunning and producing for a really long time, and I do love that part of the process. I don’t think it’s something that will ever be completely out of my life. There’s something about working with a talented director who has a vision and really helping them kind of hone that and bring it to life that I love. But, you know, obviously I also have, I think, something to say about the world and society and women and these stories.

As the years have gone on, directing has really become the goal. So, when I read this story — I mean, look there’s so many stories out there. They get so quickly snatched up the minute a really crazy story hits any newsmagazine, it’s basically already been optioned for six months before it even came out. There’s definitely a competitiveness to this landscape that I think is very real. And the thing for me that I was looking for as I was starting to kind of go down this path of, like, “what do I want to direct and what do I want to say,” the stories that have always resonated with me are the ones where the characters and the worlds are so rich. And I do think that those are a bit harder to find, and I think this really fit the bill.

It’s a perfect title. My colleague thinks you stole it from a 2024 article he wrote that references the Rudolph case. But what is the actual story of landing on “Trophy Wife” for the title?

That’s so funny. We were — for a really long time — we were actually calling this Larryworld. There’s this thing that everyone says … that, “It’s Larry’s world and we’re all living in it.” That’s kind of the ethos with which he lived his life. And that was the working title — to the point that I probably still, honestly, call it that most of the time (and did) up until the very end. And I think we kind of realized, like, “OK, no one’s gonna probably watch this if it’s called Larryworld, because they don’t know who Larry is.” It’s a concept that we have to explain once you get into the show.

So, obviously the hunting motif is a huge thing here. Our very funny and witty and incredible co-producer Madeleine Carr— we were, you know, kicking around ideas and she said “Trophy Wife” and were like, “Oh, that’s it!” It just resonated immediately. It felt so right.

Did you find any truth to the defense’s trial claim that Larry and Bianca had an open marriage, and that Bianca cheated on Larry first?

It’s hard to say when there’s two people in a marriage. What we do know is that everyone who knew them was like, “No way.” And that was never really discussed prior to that, to the point that everyone who heard it at the time, who like I said, knew them for 20-plus years, was like, “What is he talking about?”

Now, there definitely was an element here — that was a question mark of — what did she know, when did she know it, how did she know it? It was something that we aimed to answer in the series, but I don’t know that (we did). Look, she’s not here to tell us. And so I think we have people speculating about what she knew when. I think it’s very clear after the Safari Club situation blew up, it was undeniable what was going on. She had to know, and she reacted. And they moved to Arizona and really made an effort to change the course of the way that they were living their lives, to take him out of that environment and give themselves a fresh start.

Everyone also says she was very religious. This was a whole thing with the cremation part of the story too. She’s a very religious woman. And for this to only come out in his defense at the trial, when he’s on the stand, I think to the jury— you hear them say it, it just felt really, like, victim-blaming. Like, why would you say that in your defense? Like, “Oh, well, she was doing it, so it was OK that I was doing it.” It just feels like we’re talking about something completely different that has nothing to do with what happened in that cabin in Zambia.

It’s hard to understand how Bianca was not aware of the nature of Larry’s relationship with Lori.

Here’s the other part of it. If she did know — as women, there’s such a burden placed upon us. First of all, when you are not a breadwinner in your family, when the financial dynamics are such — we get into it a little bit in episode three, but there’s a lot more to say about the way he used money to control both of these women in there in his life, Bianca and Lori, right? He had the money, he had the power. He was the breadwinner. And when you’re dealing with somebody like Larry Rudolph — just to play it out, say she did ask for a divorce, or did ask for a separation or whatever, in response to this. What happens when it comes to custody? We see how vindictive and vengeful he can be.

Whether you believe it was an accident or a murder aside, you see just the behavior over the years and I can’t imagine that she didn’t see this side of him that was vengeful and was vindictive. So like, as a woman and a mother of children that you love, what do you do? Do you go along to get along and, you know, just kind of keep it moving, to keep your family together? Or do you try to stand up to him? And by the way, she did! We say it in episode three, she eventually did issue him an ultimatum and say, “Stop it. Stop this.” And look what happened. So when you’re dealing with somebody who potentially has narcissistic tendencies, who can be vindictive, who can be vengeful, who can be spiteful — what are you supposed to do as a woman when you’re in that situation?

Is there any chance in your eyes that Larry did not kill Bianca?

The thing that fascinates me the most about this case is [that] I really think you can see it from both angles. I think that’s really what we aimed to do in episode three — and frankly, my whole career long. I did a series years ago that is one of my favorite projects that I’ve ever worked on, called Trial By Media. The premise of that whole series was [that] all of these cases can be viewed from multiple angles.

[Trophy Wife] really fits this bill — it’s ambiguous…It’s hard to say. No one was in that cabin other than the two of them. And I think when you look at the government’s case — they had a strong case. There were so many character witnesses. There were so many people that came forward and talked about a pattern of behavior, and the two ultimatums leading up to this and the obsession with money. There’s a very clear motive to understand why he would do this. That is often absent in cases like this. There’s a clear path.

But then there’s, of course, the other side to this. He had a really good defense team. Think about the bartender’s story, [which] is, like, the most kind of crucial thing to me. To go from, “I killed my fucking wife for you!” — “Oh, my God, he’s confessed in a bar to Laurie, she’s in on it! Oh, my God! The smoking gun!” And then to just add two words to the top of that and go, could he have said, “They said, I killed my fucking wife for you”? The whole thing changes meaning; I just kind of find myself constantly pulled in all these directions.

The series has interviews with coworkers who said Lori was pure evil as well as her own daughter who said her mom was a saint. You interviewed Lori from prison — who is right?

This was why it was crucial that we had her daughter as part of the storytelling here. It’s like, how many bosses have you had that you don’t like? All of these dental assistants, these women — who were awesome — have really been through a lot. The way that they saw Lori was as Larry’s right hand and they lived in fear of Larry. And their take on her was that she was the one carrying out a lot of what happened in the office, whether it was just through complicity or through bad behavior herself. There was a lot of anger and hatred directed towards her.

I think when you talk to the daughter, and you hear about the softer side of her and how she was at home and how she was with the kids and understand that this is someone who was a single mom — I don’t even know if we ended up putting this in in the doc. When she met Larry, she was driving like 16 miles to work and back every day and coming home and taking care of the kids by herself. She really had a big burden on her shoulders. It’s crucial that you’re able to … see her in both ways.

(Lori’s daughter) Steph’s version of her is what Steph’s truth is. She’s her mother; she loves her. I don’t think she’s hiding anything or covering anything up or changing anything — I think that is her version of who her mother was. And then I also think it’s true that she was a version of who these women describe her as at the office.

That is the thing about it that is so fascinating when you look at her, like, was she an accomplice? Was she a villain? Was she a victim? Was she aware of what was going on? Was she unaware of what was going on? She was in love with him until the end. She never flips on him; she never turns on him. She trusts him so implicitly until the end. And it’s kind of like, and how are we supposed to feel about about that? Is it love or is it greed? Is it both?