Killer Thriller: Joe Exotic Was Charming… Until He Was Terrifying. Brian Van Holt on the Tiger King Chaos
misSPELLING
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Remember when Tiger King completely took over everyone’s life during COVID? Brian Van Holt was right in the middle of bringing that chaos to life in Joe vs. Carole, playing one of the only grounded people in a world full of extremes. He gets into what made Joe Exotic so unsettling, how someone could be charming one second and dangerous the next, and why people stayed even as things got darker. And then there’s the moment everything shifts, when the chaos becomes impossible to ignore.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:10.7 | Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes present. |
| 0:13.5 | Killer Thriller with your host, Alisa Donovan. |
| 0:19.0 | Hey, everyone. Elisa Donovan here, and this is killer thriller. |
| 0:23.6 | Today, we are diving into a true crime story that was already wild. |
| 0:29.7 | And then it got the Hollywood treatment. |
| 0:32.0 | First, there were the headlines. |
| 0:34.6 | Joe Exotic, the so-called Tiger King, and a murder for higher plot targeting animal |
| 0:40.0 | rights activist Carol Baskin. Then came Joe v. Carroll, the series that tried to make sense of all |
| 0:46.7 | of it. But in the middle of that chaos was someone who wasn't chasing attention and wasn't |
| 0:52.3 | playing to the cameras. And that is John Ranky. He ran the |
| 0:58.0 | exotic animal zoo at the center of all of the chaos. And he saw firsthand how things went from |
| 1:03.5 | eccentric to something much darker. And the man who brought him to life in that series is Brian Van Holt. |
| 1:11.9 | Brian, thank you so much for being here today with me. |
| 1:15.9 | Oh, thank you for having me. |
| 1:17.2 | It's my, it's my pleasure. |
| 1:19.3 | I first got the email from my manager about the invite, and I assumed, based on the title |
| 1:24.4 | of the podcast, that it was going to have to do with my, you know, |
| 1:27.8 | for the movie I did, House of Wax. |
| 1:29.6 | Oh, well, listen, if that was, you know, based on something real, then we definitely, |
| 1:36.9 | we would talk about that too. |
... |
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