PUNK ROCK STAR of STAGE AND SCREEN

John Cameron Mitchell, actor, director, and rent-regulated Village bohemian, has taken his streamer paycheck to New Orleans, where he’s hoping to reconnect with what New York used to feel like.

- Matthew Schneier

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL and I are driving through New Orleans, in a black VW Tiguan new enough to not yet have plates, to see the house that Joe Exotic bought. Not Joe himself, the exotic-animal zookeeper (a.k.a. Joseph MaldonadoPassage) made famous by Netflix’s opiate-of-the-pandemic docuseries Tiger King, who is currently serving time for attempted murder for hire in a federal penitentiary in North Carolina. But playing Joe Exotic in Peacock’s new scripted series Joe vs. Carole, which begins streaming March 3 and dramatizes Exotic’s zesty, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt criminal rivalry with fellow big-cat keeper Carole Baskin (Kate McKinnon), is what gave Mitchell the wherewithal to become a homeowner at the age of 58.

For 29 years, home for Mitchell has been a rent-stabilized West Village one-bedroom with a refrigerator tucked into a living room corner and a copy of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks … framed on a wall. (On a recent visit, they were joined by one of Exotic’s costume nipple rings sitting on a side table.) The story of his career, like so many others in New York, is a real-estate story: The apartment deal Mitchell got, and held on to, helped him go from being a stage actor to a downtown queer impresario who never really had to sell out.

Since Mitchell broke through with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a glam-rock drag musical he wrote with his friend Stephen Trask—and starred in, first onstage, then onscreen—he has flirted with mainstream audiences and the industry suits who court them, then plunged into some of the least marketable projects imaginable. After directing himself in the film version of Hedwig, to critical if not commercial success, he conceived