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Kristen Bell isn’t fighting the internet’s dream casting for her husband as Joe Exotic — she’s leaning into it.
Weeks after Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness turned a big-cat-breeding gun enthusiast into a household name, the campaign to cast Dax Shepard as Joe Exotic in an eventual biopic has picked up real steam. Shepard started the push himself on Twitter, and it escalated when Joe Exotic’s own ex-husband weighed in. Entertainment Tonight caught up with Kristen Bell by video chat on April 2, 2020, to get her read on the whole thing, and she wasn’t shy about it.
- Dax Shepard tweeted, “If I don’t get cast as Joe Exotic in the eventual biopic, Hollywood is broken,” kicking off a casting debate that pulled in actors like Edward Norton.
- Joe Exotic’s ex-husband, John Finlay, told David Spade on Lights Out that he’d back Shepard for the role — while pitching Channing Tatum to play himself.
- Kristen Bell told ET she was fully on board, joking about the transformation and CGI it would take to get Shepard looking the part.
Origins of the Casting Campaign
The Tiger King obsession that swallowed quarantine-era America in March 2020 didn’t just produce memes about Carole Baskin — it produced an instant parlor game over who should play the doc’s larger-than-life subjects if Hollywood ever adapts the story as scripted drama. Shepard threw his hat in the ring almost immediately, framing it as a near-moral imperative for the industry. That tweet set off a chain reaction of actors and fans floating their own picks, with Edward Norton among the names tossed around in the same breath.
An Endorsement From Inside the Story
The campaign got a serious credibility boost when it stopped being just an internet bit. John Finlay — Joe Exotic’s real-life ex-husband, whose gold-toothed, tattooed presence became one of the docuseries’ most talked-about figures — told David Spade on Lights Out that he was firmly in Shepard’s corner for the role. Finlay’s ask was a package deal of sorts: Shepard as Joe, Channing Tatum playing him.
Kristen Bell’s Reaction
Speaking with ET, Bell confirmed her husband was thrilled to have Finlay’s blessing and made clear she wasn’t going to be the one talking him out of it. She leaned into the comedy of the physical gap between Shepard and Exotic, joking about just how much makeup, hair, or digital trickery it might take to sell the transformation on screen.
Bell confirmed Shepard was thrilled by Finlay’s endorsement, joking about the physical transformations and CGI it might take to pull off the eccentric zookeeper’s look.
That’s the tone of the whole exchange — playful, not defensive. Bell wasn’t weighing pros and cons of her husband taking on a controversial real-life figure; she was riffing on the internet’s favorite new casting fantasy right alongside everyone else, treating a stranger’s on-air endorsement from a podcast segment as basically the biggest news of Shepard’s week. For more on the Tiger King circus that made all this possible, check out how Carole Baskin became a viral phenomenon in her own right, or catch up on other celebrities going off-script in interviews the way Bell did here.
No studio has greenlit an actual Tiger King scripted adaptation, so for now the whole thing lives on Twitter threads, a Finlay endorsement on David Spade’s show, and a wife who’s clearly not going to stand in the way — she’s already picking out the CGI.
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