David Spade just got an intriguing offer for a new role, from a most unlikely source.

The Tiger King himself, Joe Exotic, called in to the most recent episode of Spade and cohost Dana Carvey‘s Fly on the Wall podcast, where he discussed his issues with various  TV series that have depicted the chain of events that led to his current incarceration at the Federal Medical Center in Forth Worth.

“You know, before they actually came out with that,” the reality star said, referring to the 2022 miniseries Joe vs. Carole, starring John Cameron Mitchell as the former tiger keeper, “they were going to cast Nicolas Cage. And I was like, ‘No, no, Nicolas Cage is too dry. I said, ‘Come on!’ You want to have a real show? You got to cast David Spade to play  Joe Dirt,’ you know?”

Reps for Cage did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment.

Spade joked back, “How about this? Here’s my audition: ‘F— you, Carole Baskin, you b—-!”

Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Allen Maldonado, revealed that he “finally saw Tiger King for the first time about four months ago.” The Netflix docuseries, which premiered its first season in March 2020, was what first shined a national spotlight on the wild feud between Maldonado and Carole Baskin, rival big cat keepers who at the time ran an amateur zoo in Oklahoma and professional wildlife sanctuary in Tampa, respectively. Spade and Carvey were shocked it had taken Maldonado so long to watch the series that brought him such notoriety that, within months of its release, he would be convicted on charges that he had hired a hit man to murder Baskin.

“It was a great show. I mean, it was riveting, right?” Spade asked. But Maldonado demurred. “I was pretty disgusted with it to start with, because I was like, ‘They made me out to be this big meth head. And I’m the only one on the show with teeth [who is] wearing clothes, you know what I mean?” He then took aim at Joe vs. Carole, alleging the eight-part Peacock miniseries “made me out to be a whole lot more gayer than I am.”

“If they wanted to make money, they would have to cast David to play me, because that guy that played me went way over the top,” Maldonado said.

“Listen, I can do super-gay. Just give me some notes,” Spade responded.

Cage confirmed that he had read “two excellent scripts” for a planned Amazon dramatization of the events chronicled in Tiger King in 2021. But he shared that ultimately, the company “felt that it was material that had become past tense because it took so long for it come together.”

No sweat off Maldonado’s back, who claims to always have preferred Spade to Cage. Ditto for Mitchell, but Maldonado hasn’t voiced his approval or disapproval of Bowen Yang’s impersonation of him on a November 2024 episode of SNL.

That sketch made light of Maldonado’s persistent call for President Donald Trump to pardon him of the 19 criminal counts he was convicted on.

“I don’t hold anything against the Jan. 6 people,” he told EW in January, “but some of them people really hurt some police officers and they’re free because they were hostages. Hell, I’m a hostage, I’m a political prisoner in America, and I’m asking President Donald J. Trump to put an end to this and let me go home.”