John Cameron Mitchell is the star of Peacock's new series Joe Vs Carole, the dramatized story of Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin. Netflix's Tiger King documentary took the world by storm in 2020 – and this new show goes even deeper.
The show stars Mitchell and SNL's Kate McKinnon as Exotic and Carole Baskin and follows them from seven years before Exotic hires someone to murder her, the crime that landed him in prison where he currently resides.
Mitchell, who is most widely as the star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, submitted his first audition tape in 25 years to land the role. "This [was] worth auditioning for," the out actor tells PRIDE.
Perhaps the roles aren't too different. "I realize in retrospect that there's blonde wigs and they're both larger than life unique people who triumphed over adversity and then were almost destroyed by their own anger and internalized trauma," Mitchell points out. "And they both focus on an enemy. Hedwig focuses on her ex, Tommy. Joe focuses on Carole as the cause of everything that's gone wrong in their life. And we all know those people who do that. They're stalkers and they're fans in one way, or they can be just the embodiment of everything, the embodiment of the world trying to destroy them."
When crafting the character, Mitchell's mission was to find the human being behind the spectacle that is Joe Exotic. "I found one video of him as a young man in the in the '90s when his husband was still alive, and he's much softer, he's got a lisp, he's kind of gentle and he's not this loud thing," Mitchell recalls. "He's just loving on his animals, as he said. And I'm like, that's the key. This is the real Joe. He covered up all the other stuff with the guns and the mullets and the handlebar mustaches to defend himself from the world."
The sensationalism of the character actually turned him off from the story back when it became a worldwide phenomenon. The docu-series "had that kind of American sort of surface view of it, like look at the freaks," he says. "It was a great story, but it didn't go deep. It didn't have a lot of empathy. It was looking for the trouble."
That's not Mitchell's depiction of Joe. "When I got the role, I went on a deep dive and looked at all the other footage, the other documentaries and footage. For example, docuseries didn't really talk about his 17 year old marriage which ended when his husband died of AIDS. How can you not talk about that when you talk about the formation of a person and a personality and the bitterness and the paranoia? If you're beaten down because you're a little gay boy and disrespected, which often happened in that part of the country, how can you not talk about that to explain he was so crazy and paranoid?"
Ultimately, "This is someone who's real underneath there. And I wanna be able to break people's hearts as well as break their balls."
Joe Vs Carole is streaming now on Peacock. Watch our full interview with John Cameron Mitchell below:
