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.