Filming is already underway on Peacock’s dramatic retelling of the life and times of Joe Exotic, and the first snapshots of Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of Carole Baskin have surfaced online. Set-tracking paparazzi managed to get quite a few snapshots of the Saturday Night Live star as the enigmatic big cat activist. Some of the pictures even include a look at Kyle MacLachlan’s Howard Baskin as well. You can see them collected below.
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When we spoke with Baskin earlier this year, she gave her stamp of approval to the casting.
“I’m honored that they would pick somebody so beautiful and so talented, but they’re going to have to put a lot of makeup on that young woman to make her look like a 60-year-old lady,” Baskin told us at the time.
The only thing Baskin hoped for, she said, was a more faithful telling of what actually went on. According to her, the Netflix docuseries didn’t tell both sides of the story.
“I am happy about the fact that everything that I have read so far says that they’re going to follow the same narratives that was in the Wondery podcast because in the Wondery podcast at the end, they said, ‘But here’s the truth,’” she added. “And they actually felt the truth, whereasย Tiger Kingย just never got to that part. So I’m hoping that that will be the case with whatever they do with that piece.”
While the first season of the show became a runaway hit at the height of the pandemic, Baskin opted to stay far away from the show’s second season.
“It was just a few weeks ago that [director] Rebecca Chaiklin had reached out asking if we could clear the air,” Baskin said to the outlet. “I have been speaking about how we had been so misled into thinking this was going to be the Blackfish for big cats, and then it turned out to be the freak show that they produced. So when she said she wanted to clear the air, I felt like…that’s just absolutely ridiculous. It was so obvious that I had been betrayed by them. Why would she ever think that I would be willing to speak to them again. And so I told her to just lose my number.”
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness is now streaming on Netflix. Tiger King 2 is currently set for release on November 17th. Peacock’s Joe Exotic series has yet to set a release date.
