Nicolas Cage Cast To Play ‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic In Scripted Series
By Paul Bois - The Daily Wire
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After weeks of debate and speculation over who will play Joe Exotic – the infamous anti-hero in Netflix’s wildly popular docuseries “Tiger King” – Academy Award-winning actor Nicolas Cage has been tapped to play the coveted role.
According to Variety, Imagine Television and CBS Television Studios will be producing the series, which will be based on the Texas Monthly article, “Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild,” by Leif Reigstad.
“CBS TV Studios optioned the article in June of 2019. Dan Lagana will serve as writer, showrunner, and executive producer under his overall deal at CBS TV Studios with Paul Young executive producing via Make Good Content,” reported Variety. “Imagine’s Brian Grazer and Samie Kim Falvey will executive produce for Imagine. Cage will executive produce via Saturn Films. Scott Brown and Megan Creydt will executive produce for Texas Monthly. Imagine’s James Seidman and Natalie Berkus are overseeing the project for the company.”
This marks the second scripted series about Joe Exotic to be greenlighted. The first will star actress Kate McKinnon as animal rights activist Carole Baskin.
Netflix released “Tiger King” on March 20, with the docuseries instantly becoming an international sensation. As the Netflix show chronicles in detail, Joe Exotic, real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage, was sentenced to 22 years in jail after an Oklahoma jury convicted him in 2019 of animal cruelty and contracting a hitman to kill his chief rival, animal rights activist Carole Baskin of Big Cat Rescue (the hitman did not go through with the act). Though not conclusively proving it one way or the other, the documentary postulated Exotic may have been set up by his business partner, Jeff Lowe.
The documentary’s open-ended treatment of Exotic’s crime has led to speculation that he could be viable for a presidential pardon. In a recent Facebook post, Exotic publicly asked Trump to grant him a presidential pardon, arguing that key witnesses lied under oath and that prosecutors simply wanted to get a win with no regard for the truth.
“I am being sent to Prison because a seasoned con man wanted my zoo so bad for free that he set me up in a plan he devised to look like I participated in his murder for hire scheme to get me out of his way to take over,” Exotic said in the Facebook post.
“Mr. President, I am pleading with you to please have this looked into,” he concluded. “I am currently incarcerated at the Grady County Jail in Oklahoma and facing 20 – 50 years in prison for doing the same thing every zoo and sanctuary owner has had to do at one time or another.”
During a recent White House press conference, a reporter even went as far to ask President Trump if he would grant Joe Exotic a presidential pardon. “I’ll take a look,” the president replied.
