YouTube pranksters trick Carole Baskin into giving exclusive interview by posing as Jimmy Fallon on Zoom

Did you watch Netflix’s The Tiger King? Well, it’d probably be easier to ask you if you haven’t watched it, seeing as half the planet has.

If you’ve clicked on this article you’ll probably know all about Carole Baskin: the animal rights activist and nemesis of the Netflix show’s protagonist Joe Exotic, who is in jail for paying someone to murder her.

Unexpectedly, the disappearance of Baskin’s first husband Don became a focal point of the Netflix show. Lots of people have accused Baskin of murdering her husband and feeding him to tigers, which she has always strongly denied. She’s also refuted Netflix’s portrayal of the relationship and her husband’s disappearance.

With the internet being the internet, that hasn’t stopped people from having *a lot* (like, so much) to say about it.

As the dust began to settle on the controversial show, Baskin has given her first official interview since it dropped on Netflix in March.

But there’s a catch.

Insider reports that Baskin thought she was being interviewed by late night TV legend Jimmy Fallon for "The Tonight Show."

... When she was actually being asked questions by YouTubers Josh Pieters and Archie Manners, pretending to be the late night host.

The pair have been tricking different celebrities into thinking they were being interviewed by famous people via Zoom, given that’s how most interviews are being done these days while everyone is inside.

To do this, they’ve been using questions from old clips of Fallon’s from previous interviews.

And miraculously, people have been falling for it.

In the series of episodes, the pair have tricked UK pop star Craig David, a TikTok star and Love Island runners up Molly-Mae and Tommy Fury.

In tricking Baskin, the pair have somehow managed to bag a world exclusive.

Pieters told Insider in his first interview about the stunt:

Here's a chance where we could perhaps interview some high level talent because we are going under the guise of being a really famous show.

And we thought, why don't we take a shot in the dark and go for the most exclusive, hard to reach person in the world, with absolutely no hope of it working?

If you recognise Pieters and Manners, it might be because they famously duped right-wing talking-head Katie Hopkins to win a fake award with a very NSFW acronym. They also sold microwave meals on Deliveroo and pranked people with an Ed Sheeran lookalike.

Pieters partially credits lockdown with pulling the prank of successfully, but thinks it's got more to do with the power dynamics at play between the famous interviewer and the lesser known interviewee.

I wouldn't say it's thanks to lockdown.

It was just really interesting seeing people like Prince William and all these people you'd never imagined to see on Zoom, and Zoom becoming such a big thing.

I think it's also very hard when you are live on an interview with who you think is James Corden or Jimmy Fallon, to go, 'Hold on a second, that's not Jimmy Fallon,' when it sounds like him," 

You'd have to be pretty sure of yourself and pretty brave to stop the interview.

He says that Baskin is a "very interesting lady" and is looking forward to everyone hearing the interview, saying:

We really did not expect it to work.

We still can't really believe we managed to interview Carole Baskin.

Hopefully Baskin won’t be too red faced about the whole thing, seeing as she’s new to the limelight and it’d be pretty difficult to realise what was going on under the circumstances.

But maybe we should all start cutting the animal rights activist some slack because… has she really done anything so wrong?

You can catch the video on the pair's YouTube channel.

H/T: Insider / Lindsay Dodgson