Despite playing Joe Exotic in Peacock’s upcoming Joe vs. Carole, John Cameron Mitchell could hardly stomach to watch the most popular documentary Exotic appeared in. Just as much of the world was beginning to shut down in the earliest parts of 2020, Netflix’s Tiger King Murder, Mayhem, and Madness quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Still, Mitchell couldn’t bring himself to watch.
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“There’s something about him that I actually couldn’t really bear to watch the whole thing at first, because it was like, everyone’s behaving so badly,” the actor said in a recent chat with EW. “The docuseries I found a bit sensational. It was certainly riveting, but it was docking. It wasn’t trying to go deep.”
Though Tiger King is far and away the most popular piece of media featuring Exotic, the Peacock series is technically based on a podcast from Wondery.
“He’s trying to fit in, he’s trying to create a sanctuary for not only his animals, but for all these broken people that come to work for him, including boyfriends. He definitely has to be the king of it, the king of them, which ends up becoming kind of destructive. But I understand it. I create my own sanctuaries with my movies and plays,” says the actor, who once lived just an hour away from the notorious Oklahoma zoo. “Even though I had not much in common with him, I do relate to him.”
“Joe vs. Carole is a wild ride. It’s a fun and rich journey into the story of people who live very extreme lives,” showrunner Etan Frankel previously shared in a statement. ”When I took on this project a year and a half ago, I found Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin to be utterly fascinating, and this crazy tale about two big cat lovers quickly became an important story for me to tell. I hope that when people watch Joe vs. Carole just maybe they’ll see these people that they thought they knew in a brand-new way. We knew it would take two extraordinary actors to portray these larger-than-life people as the complex, three-dimensional individuals that they are. John Cameron Mitchell is one of the most gifted and thoughtful actors I’ve ever worked with. He cares so deeply about the work, and his performance is breathtaking. And Kate McKinnon is simply remarkable. She is able to make us double over with laughter one moment and then break our hearts the next. It was an absolute thrill to watch these two exceptional actors morph into these roles.”
Check out Joe vs. Carole when it premieres on Peacock on March 3rd.
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Image Courtesy of Netflix
