The right man for the role

'Tiger King': Nicolas Cage To Play Joe Exotic In New Scripted Series With CBS

The first Joe Exotic-centred Tiger King adaptation has found its star! Nicolas Cage was just confirmed as the lead in a new eight-episode TV series. Get the details here.

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The highly-sought-after role as Tiger King's Joe Exotic (aka Joseph Maldonado-Passage) has gone to... Nicolas Cage!

The popular actor will portray Exotic in an eight-episode series from Imagine Television Studios and CBS Television Studios. Variety broke the news in an exclusive report on Monday morning.

Tiger King: Nicholas Cage will play Joe Exotic

The new Nicolas Cage-starring series takes as its source material an article titled "Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild," written by Leif Reigstad in Texas Monthly.

Dan Lagana will serve as writer and showrunner. He's best-known for work on the Netflix series American Vandal.

In Variety's exclusive, they describe the new series as follows:

"The story centers around Joe Schreibvogel, a.k.a Joe Exotic, an eccentric, exotic zookeeper in Oklahoma who fights to keep his park even at the risk of losing his sanity. The series will live in the lion's den with Joe, explore how he became Joe Exotic, and how he lost himself to a character of his own creation."

Netflix's Tiger King continues to fascinate

The docuseries Tiger King emerged as a quarantine viewing hit when it arrived on Netflix in late March 2020. Ever since, there's been much speculation on potential stars who could portray the main figures, Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, in an adaptation. (Exotic didn't get either of his first choices, though.)

CBS's series will be the first dramatized version of Joe Exotic's story, but not the first based on a Tiger King star's life. Kate McKinnon is already in line to play Baskin in another series that's in production.

The TV role will be a change of pace for Cage. He's of course known for countless movie roles, including Face/Off, Leaving Las Vegas, and National Treasure. In more recent years, the actor has appeared in indie productions including Mandy.

We eagerly await a first look at Cage in character as Joe Exotic!