Carole Baskin Hopes Kate McKinnon’s ‘Tiger King’ Show ‘Doesn’t End Up Doing What Cardi B Did’

It’s official that Kate McKinnon is playing eclectic animal activist Carole Baskin in a series based on Netflix’s Tiger King, the defining pop culture artifact of the quarantine-era (only half-joking!), and the real-life Cameo star has some thoughts.

“[Kate] has not reached out to me and I really hope that she does before she gets too far down the line with it. I’d love to know what her take is on it and what she’s thinking to do and see if there was any way we could advise her,” Baskin said on The Pet Show podcast co-hosted by Jimmy Jellinek and Dennis Quaid (not the cat Dennis Quaid, but the human Dennis Quaid). She then got into what she doesn’t want to see on the series:

“We reached out to her through the media — because I don’t have any way of contacting Kate McKinnon — but we had posted publicly that we really hope that her or anybody that does any kind of follow-up programming doesn’t end up doing what Cardi B did and hiring people that are exploiting and abusing cats. It’s like the worst thing you can do is abuse cats to show other people that you shouldn’t abuse cats.”

Cardi B and Baskin engaged in an unlikely feud over the use of tigers in the rapper’s “WAP” music video with Megan Thee Stallion. “You have to pose a wildcat in front of a green screen to get that image and that doesn’t happen in the wild… That tells me they probably dealt with one of the big cat pimps, probably even one of the ones shown in [Tiger King], who make a living from beating, shocking, and starving cats to make them stand on cue in front of a green screen in a studio. That’s never good for the cat,” Baskin said. Cardi’s response: “Like, girl you killed your goddamn husband.”

In the podcast interview, Baskin also joked () that she “could just slap” Chloe Fineman for her impression of her on SNL (Colin Jost can relate). “This whole, ‘My kitty, meow, meow, kitty, meow,’ and then she would just say these really weird words all in a row. That all became popular, I guess, in popular culture and people wanted me to talk like that on the Cameos… I have no idea how to talk like that. That is not how I speak.”

“That all became popular, I guess, in popular culture” is also how I’m going to describe Tiger King to my grandkids in 50 years.