Culture

Louis Theroux meets Carole Baskin in ‘unexpected’ new Joe Exotic documentary

Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux feat Carole Baskin (Twitter/@MindhouseTV)

Louis Theroux has met up with the one and only Carole Baskin for his new BBC documentary about Joe Exotic.

The acclaimed documentarian and big cat enthusiast were seen together on set of Louis Theroux: Shooting Joe Exotic, in a socially-distanced snap shared by Mindhouse Productions on Thursday (25 March).

The upcoming feature-length special will explore what happened in the ten years after Theroux’s documentary, America’s Most Dangerous Pets in 2011.

Spoiler: a lot has happened.

When Louis first met Joe Exotic at the GW Exotic Animal Park, the zoo owner was simply an eccentric gun-toting gay polygamist who was little known outside the US.

That all changed last year when he shot to stardom in Netflix’s smash-hit docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

Joe Exotic finally got the fame of his dreams, but by this point he was serving 22 years in federal prison for a litany of animal abuses and a plot to kill his nemesis Carole Baskin – who now owns his zoo.

The upcoming 90-minute special will use unseen footage that was filmed for Theroux’s 2011 documentary alongside new interviews with those close to Exotic.

Announcing the documentary last week, Theroux said: “I spent eight or nine days filming at the park back in 2011, over the course of three separate visits. I’d forgotten how much we shot until I went back into the footage during lockdown. It’s extraordinary how much was there.

“Since then the story just got stranger and bigger, and in going back at the end of last year I uncovered a real-life drama that took me in directions I never could have expected.”

For the cats!

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