In our interview with John Cameron Mitchell, we discuss 'Joe vs. Carole,' immersing himself in Joe Exotic, and his 'Sandman' role.
Created by Kate McKinnon and Etan Frankel, the Peacock limited series Joe vs. Carole digs into the rivalry between zoo operator and big cat breeder Joe Exotic and big cat enthusiast Carole Baskin . The pair each knew exactly how to get under the other’s skin, and their clashing viewpoints about how to handle the exotic animals they both claimed to love led them down a road that landed Joe in prison for 22 years, for plotting Carole’s murder.
JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL: I just immersed myself. I hadn’t seen the docu-series. I watched a little bit for the audition, and then watched the rest of it later. It wasn’t to my taste. It was a little too unempathetic. But there’s so much footage of him. There was one particular tape of him, as a very young man in the ‘90s, and he was a softer creature. He had a lisp, and he was not brash and over the top, he was just loving on his animals. I thought, “This is the core of him.
It’s such an interesting show because the first instinct, when you hear about something like this, is to wonder why we need a fictional version of Joe and Carole. We already know how crazy all of this was. But in watching this, you realize that you really just have formed caricature of them in your mind and this show makes them both feel human and humanized.
MITCHELL: Definitely, hair, makeup and costumes are an actor’s biggest tools. I immersed myself in observing his videos and tried to capture stuff. There was a video of him of as a very young man who was very delicate, and I reminded myself that this was the real Joe. All of that stuff – the mullet, the belts, the boots – does something to your body. You take advantage of it. I grew up in that part of the country, so I understand the easygoing, macho thing.
But Joe never gets to that point. He goes all the way. The natural conclusion of that kind of gun-toting, macho thing is attempted murder or murder, if you think about it. He saw, in Carole, everyone who ever hurt him, which is unrealistic. Carole saw, in him, every man that ever abused her. That was gonna end in tears, whatever happened. She didn’t come out, from the docu-series, very well either.
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