Brian Van Holt, best known for roles in Cougar Town, The Bridge, and John From Cincinnati, is set to star as John Reinke in Peacock‘s Joe Exotic series. The docu-drama, based on the same podcast that inspired the true-crime series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, which took social media by storm at the start of the pandemic, is set to go into production later this year with Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters: Answer the Call veteran Kate McKinnon appearing in the role of Carole Baskin. John Cameron Mitchell stars as Joe “Exotic” Schreibvogel, and the series centers on the conflict that breaks out between Baskin and Schreibvogel.
The Netflix series instantly made the small group of eccentrics at the heart of the Baskin/Schreibvogel feud into celebrities, and catapulted a years-old question about the whereabouts of Baskin’s late husband into the pop culture zeitgeist.
Schreibvogel is currently in prison, convicted of trying to hire someone to kill Baskin. Many of his remaining assets have either been awarded to Baskin, of liquidated, to pay civil suits related to the crime. There are severael projects currently in development centering on the “Tiger King” story, including a movie with Nicolas Cage attached.
Deadline first reported Van Holt’s casting.
For a minute there, this seemed to be a new trajectory for McKinnon, who had also signed on for a Hulu series in which she would play Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO behind Theranos.
Holmes was an engineering wunderkind, who dropped out of Stanford to found a healthcare technology company which she said would change medical science. Offering a low-cost, quick-turnaround alternative to traditional blood testing, Theranos was poised to make everyone involved incredibly rich while also providing a concrete service to the world.
Unfortunately, the company was built on lies and fraud, with technology that never worked and falsified results which were either entirely fabricated, or tested through traditional methods and passed off as the results of the new technology. Holmes and others at the highest levels of the company faced charges for fraud and conspiracy.
The Dropout launched as a podcast in 2019, just a year after Theranos executives were indicted. It was so successful that ABC News told the story as a two-hour documentary on 20/20 that same year. The TV version of The Dropout is set to be executive produced by the podcast’s host/creator Rebecca Jarvis, along withproducers Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson.