Entertainment
For 'Chimp Crazy' director Eric Goode, 'the end justifies the means'
The filmmaker expected his subject to be angry. To cry or scream, curse him out. He had, after all, betrayed her.
For two years, Eric Goode, the producer behind the mega-hit “Tiger King,” had purposefully concealed his identity from the star of his new documentary series. Her name was Tonia Haddix, an Ozarks-based exotic animal broker who was obsessed with chimpanzees. And Goode would ultimately play a key role in having the “humanzee” she considered her child, an ape named Tonka, removed from her home.
Yet when Goode and Haddix finally came together for a filmed face-to-face, she was cordial. Friendly, even. “She was so surprisingly OK with it,” the director, 66, recalls now. “Almost to the degree where she felt more important because it was me.”
In fact, Haddix allowed the production’s cameras to trail her for another year and a half, culminating in “Chimp Crazy,” the four-part docuseries that premiered on HBO and Max this month. Now that the program is out, however, Haddix — who did not respond to multiple inquiries from The Times — is publicly saying she never would have participated if she’d known from the outset that it was a Goode production. Critics, too, have called the series’ ethics into question, voicing concerns about what standards should apply to nonfiction filmmakers, especially those making series with high entertainment value.
“Chimp Crazy’s” main subject, Tonia Haddix.
(HBO)
Goode admits he doesn’t know how he identifies: Journalist? “I don’t think so.” Animal rights activist? “No. I’m more of an animal welfare guy.” He wasn’t even a filmmaker before “Tiger King.”
Goode does not necessarily feel obligated to follow the educational or ethical guidelines by which conservationists and journalists abide. Without these “indoctrinated boundaries,” as he calls them, he has the freedom to find — or, in the case of “Chimp Crazy,” provoke — dramatic on-screen conflicts and satisfying resolutions that traditional documentarians might not. Still, Goode’s own discomfort with the tactics he employed against Haddix points to the pitfalls of this approach. He may not characterize himself as an activist, but his work as a filmmaker originated with his desire to protect exotic animals — and any viewer of “Chimp Crazy” or “Tiger King” who isn’t aware of that background is liable to feel unmoored.
With its cast of outlandish characters and a well-timed premiere date — it launched on Netflix in March 2020, right when COVID-19 lockdowns forced everyone indoors — “Tiger King,” a seven-episode exploration of the world of private tiger ownership, became one of the wildest successes of the streaming age. It made subject Joe Exotic, an eccentric felon with an affinity for mullets, tattooed eyeliner and big cats, into a household name. It propelled Carole Baskin, Joe’s archnemesis, onto “Dancing With the Stars.” And in 2022, the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which makes it illegal for private citizens to purchase animals like lions, tigers and leopards, was finally signed into law by President Biden after a decade of advocacy by animal rights groups.
Goode is not a big-cat aficionado himself, but he’s been drawn to reptiles since he was a boy. Growing up in Sonoma in Northern California, he and his four siblings roamed the family’s land, playing with spiders and snakes. It was the gift he received on his 6th birthday that most captured his attention, though: a Greek tortoise, whose shell would go on to become the logo for the Turtle Conservancy he opened in Ojai in 2005.
In his 20s, Goode was a nightlife fixture in New York City, co-founding Area, the 1980s club that featured art installments and merchandise from the likes of Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He would go on to launch such establishments as the Waverly Inn, the Bowery Hotel and the Jane Hotel. He palled around with Madonna, dated Naomi Campbell and directed a couple of Nine Inch Nails videos — one of which, “Pinion,” was so racy that MTV wouldn’t play the full thing on air.
Goode at his club Area with Cornelia Guest in 1985.
(Patrick McMullan / Getty Images)
It was during this era that Maurice Rodrigues, then a part-time zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo, first encountered Goode. When the fish tank broke at Goode’s now-defunct restaurant the Park, Rodrigues was called in for a repair. Afterward, Goode invited him to dinner there.
“I’m in my early 30s, just this little Jersey boy, and we’re sitting at the best table in the place surrounded by actual models,” Rodrigues remembers. “But Eric and I started talking about turtles so much that we completely ignored these beautiful women. Finally, they got frustrated and said they were leaving. And Eric’s like, ‘OK, bye!’”
Bonded by their love of chelonians — turtles, terrapins and tortoises — the two men began traveling the world together to research the reptiles. But they found the Turtle Survival Alliance conferences they attended to be drab. Instead of listening to boring lectures regurgitating scientific papers they’d already read, why not present video footage?
“Our aim was to try to buy animals from poachers and catch them on camera,” says Rodrigues. “We got undercover cameras and found a pair of eyeglasses that had a spy camera in them. I thought we were going to maybe get killed.”
Then, in 2009, “The Cove” came out. The documentary, in which a team set out to secretly capture a bloody Japanese dolphin slaughter, was named the best of the year at the Academy Awards. “That’s when Eric said, ‘Let’s not do these little amateur films anymore,’” says Rodrigues. “‘Let’s do something for a global audience that we can pitch to anyone, and if it’s successful, maybe we can raise money for conservation.’”
Goode during the filming of “Chimp Crazy.”
(HBO)
Using his own money, Goode began bringing a small professional production crew along on his travels with the aim of making a project about the extinction crisis. CNN got wind of the footage and committed to shooting a pilot for a TV series. The network ultimately passed on the show in 2019, but after “Tiger King,” Goode started to revisit some of the topics he’d been interested in for his next project.
“We were looking at bushmeat markets in Southeast Asia, female trophy hunters, butterfly collectors,” said Jeremy McBride, Goode’s producing partner. “We wanted to explore this broader theme of individuals’ relationships with exotic animals.”
That’s when things started heating up at the Missouri Primate Foundation. The facility’s owner, Connie Casey, bred chimpanzees that starred in movies, appeared on Hallmark greeting cards and appeared at children’s birthday parties — including a chimp named Travis, whom she sold for $50,000 when he was an infant, and who went on to attack a Connecticut woman named Charla Nash in 2009, ripping out her eyes, nose, lips and nine fingers.
After receiving a dozen citations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Casey was sued in 2017 by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which claimed she had violated the Endangered Species Act. That’s when Haddix, trying to purchase a chimp, learned about Casey’s struggles and agreed to take legal ownership of the animals in the hopes of helping her new friend evade trouble.
But PETA did not relent. In 2020, the organization negotiated an agreement with Haddix that stipulated she could keep some chimps on the Missouri property if she renovated and expanded their facilities.
It was in the midst of this legal back-and-forth, in June 2021, when Haddix received a phone call from Dwayne Cunningham.
“Don’t ever say anything to me that you don’t want the whole world to know,” Dwayne Cunningham, “proxy director” and a former Barnum & Bailey clown, says he told Haddix. “And Tonia being Tonia, she just kept talking.”
(HBO)
Goode brought in the former Barnum & Bailey circus clown, who was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison in 1999 for trafficking tortoises and endangered iguanas, to be his liaison to the reclusive Casey, who hadn’t granted an interview to anyone since the journalist Peter Laufer for his 2010 book, “Forbidden Creatures.” If she was going to talk to anyone, Goode surmised, it would more likely be a guy whose “livelihood was also shut down because of animal rights groups” than the guy who made “Tiger King.”
Cunningham was open to the assignment because, as an animal lover, he wanted to see with his own eyes if the chimps were truly being mistreated. Likewise, Goode couldn’t forget what Laufer — a friend who is also on the advisory board of his Turtle Conservancy — told him about his time in Missouri.
“Peter described it as being so horrific — that he’d done prison interviews and been in civil wars, and nothing prepared him for it,” says Goode. “What made me feel like it was worth it, morally and ethically, was the knowledge I had about what was going on inside that house. I thought: ‘You know what? The end justifies the means, in this case.’”
The plan worked — sort of. Though Casey never agreed to an interview, Cunningham did win over Haddix. She later told Rolling Stone that she agreed to be part of the project because Cunningham was “a big animal person” who “would even come out early just so he can help bottle-feed some of our baby hoofstock.”
With her collection of wigs, eyelash extensions and spray-tanned body, the 54-year-old made for a visually intriguing subject. Plus, she was forthcoming, admitting to the cameras that she cared more about Tonka than her own human son.
Haddix’s use of eyelash extensions, lip filler and other cosmetics are a key part of her depiction in the docuseries.
(HBO)
Just days after the film crew arrived in Missouri, a judge ruled that all seven of the chimps who lived there would be sent to a Florida ape sanctuary because Haddix had not renovated the habitat to the standards previously agreed upon with PETA.
But when local sheriff’s deputies and the U.S. Marshals Service arrived at the Missouri property to seize the seven chimps on July 28, 2021, they found only six animals. Haddix told them the missing primate, Tonka, had died on May 30 from heart failure.
As “Chimp Crazy” reveals, however, Haddix had sneaked her most beloved chimp to a friend’s house in Ohio. From there, she moved Tonka to her home near the Lake of the Ozarks, where she had outfitted her basement with a cage.
Almost immediately after kidnapping Tonka, Haddix let the documentary crew in on her secret. But she still did not know that Goode was behind the project — something he was increasingly “not fully comfortable with,” he acknowledges. “I don’t want to be that kind of person. I just kept thinking, ‘When is the right time to tell her that this is me?’ I always kind of thought it could have been sooner.”
The crew, meanwhile, was growing concerned. Haddix was in the dark, and now they had unwittingly become accessories to a crime. Alan Cumming, who starred with Tonka in the 1997 film “Buddy,” teamed up with PETA to offer a $20,000 reward for information about the chimp’s whereabouts. Cunningham, who is referred to as a “proxy director” in the series, says he and some camerapeople raised these issues with their bosses.
“I’m sure it was hard for the crew to have to understand that maybe there’s a greater good in not acting so quickly,” Goode says. “It was a very unsettling period. I was talking to my primatologist friends and saying, ‘If I don’t do something, is this chimp going to be OK?’”
Haddix with Tonka the chimp.
(HBO)
Goode shared video of Tonka from the basement with the scientists, who attempted to identify physical tics that indicate mental distress. Cunningham shared his own observations of the chimp with Goode: Tonka was clean. He wasn’t having anxiety attacks. Yes, Tonia occasionally fed him Happy Meals or Powerade, but “he was always loved,” Cunningham says.
In May 2022, Haddix confided to Cunningham that she planned to euthanize the chimp; she said the animal’s veterinarian told her Tonka was so unwell it was cruel to keep him alive. Cunningham notified Goode, who decided it was finally time to tell PETA where Tonka was.
The producers called PETA on May 30, 2022, and requested an in-person meeting. The next day, they met with the organization’s lawyers. On June 1, PETA filed an emergency motion to remove Tonka from Haddix’s care.
“We would have wanted to know the moment the filmmakers found out that Tonka was in Tonia’s basement,” says Brittany Peet, the PETA Foundation’s general counsel for captive animal law enforcement. “I’m incredibly grateful that they did ultimately loop us in so we were able to get Tonka out. I don’t think that every documentary filmmaker would have made the choice that they did, called us and risked their project to save a life.”
In the days leading up to Tonka’s removal on June 5, 2022, Haddix was still in the dark about who had revealed her secret. She confessed as much to Cunningham, who wore a hidden camera when he went to talk to her during that period.
“I didn’t feel guilty,” Cunningham insists. “I always said to Tonia, ‘Don’t ever say anything to me that you don’t want the whole world to know.’ And Tonia being Tonia, she just kept talking. So I didn’t feel guilty; I felt like I was doing my job. But I felt bad for a friend, because I could see that the love story was spiraling out of control.”
When he learned Tonka was hidden in Haddix’s basement, Goode says he wondered, “If I don’t do something, is this chimp going to be OK?”
(HBO)
When he eventually met Haddix, Goode began by telling her that he related to her. “There are certain animals,” he says in the series, “that if people took them away from me, I would be very, very upset.”
He was referring to the chelonians he keeps on his Ojai property, where approximately 40 endangered species of turtles or tortoises live. While he says he does like being around them for “selfish reasons,” the animals reside in Southern California because they’re either extinct in the wild or so endangered that poachers pose a critical risk to the remaining population. “I don’t want to say I’m, like, trying to create a loophole for why I can keep a tortoise and someone can’t keep a chimp,” he says. “It would certainly be better to keep our animals in the wild, just because the environmental conditions are very hard to replicate.”
Goode has been a controversial figure in conservation circles. Craig Stanford, a human evolutionary biologist who has led USC’s Jane Goodall Research Center, says his colleagues often question his association with someone who directed something “really trashy” like “Tiger King.” (He is on the Turtle Conservancy’s Board of Directors and sat for a “Tiger King” interview that was eventually cut.)
“How dare you capitalize on these gorgeous, endangered animals to make millions?” Stanford says, describing his peers’ criticism. “I say, ‘Well, OK, yes, but he did shine a light, and it did lead to stricter regulations. And he did donate some of the proceeds from it to a very good cause.’” (Goode says he and two other “Tiger King” partners donated $1 million of the series’ proceeds to a program for tigers in the wild in India.)
Such judgments are enough to make Goode wish one of his other, non-animal-centric projects — such as a documentary he recently shot about his late mother — was being released before “Chimp Crazy.” “That way, people wouldn’t think I’m just using this model of ‘Tiger King’ and that’s all I can do,” he says.
Goode says he hopes “Chimp Crazy” doesn’t leave audiences thinking he’s “using this model of ‘Tiger King’ and that’s all [he] can do.”
(Emil Ravelo / For The Times)
Haddix, he says, has been having a difficult time with the film’s release. A few weeks ago, Cunningham traveled to St. Louis to screen all four episodes for her. After she watched the first one, which features the most video of her with Tonka, he says she cried in his arms. Then there was silence. “I told her she had to get up off the couch because we had to move it back,” Cunningham says. “She started laughing, and that kind of broke the ice a little bit.”
They’ve continued to exchange text messages, as have Haddix and Goode. The director says Haddix requested a number of “Chimp Crazy” posters be sent to her so she could sign and sell them. In public, however, she seems to be presenting a different story. And that upsets Goode.
“She said that I offered her money so she would continue to film with me, or guaranteed she could go see Tonka — both of which are absolutely, categorically not true,” he says, noting that the production did pay her for use of some archival footage.
The way Goode sees it, Haddix would have been caught eventually, with or without him. By her own admission, she told friends, family and neighbors that Tonka was in her basement.
“So yes, we are the bad guys — we turned her in. But I think that was inevitable,” he says. “I just try to use the moral compass that my mother gave me in life. I don’t know where that falls, but there definitely is one.”
Movie Reviews
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Tommy Shelby returns for muddy, bloody big-screen showdown
After six TV series from 2013 to 2022, which caused a worrying surge in flat cap-wearing among well-to-do men in country pubs, Peaky Blinders is now getting a hefty standalone feature film, a muscular picture swamped in mud and blood. This is the movie version of Steven Knight’s global small-screen hit, based on the real-life gangs that swaggered through Birmingham from Victorian times until well into the 20th century. Cillian Murphy returns with his uniquely unsettling, almost sightless stare as Tommy Shelby, family chieftain of a Romani-traveller gang, a man who has converted his trauma in the trenches of the first world war into a ruthless determination to survive and rule.
As we join the story some years after the curtain last came down, it is 1940, Britain’s darkest hour and Tommy is the crime-lion in winter. He now lives in a huge, remote mansion, far from the Birmingham crime scene he did so much to create, alone except for his henchman Johnny Dogs, played by Packy Lee. Evidently wearied and sickened by it all, Tommy is haunted by his ghosts and demons: memories of his late brother, Arthur, and dead daughter, Ruby, and working on what will be his definitive autobiography. (Sadly, we don’t get any scenes of Tommy having lunch with a drawling London publisher or agent.)
But a charismatic and beautiful woman, played by Rebecca Ferguson, brings Tommy news of what we already know: his malign idiot son Erasmus Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan, is now running the Peaky Blinders, a new gen-Z-style group of flatcappers raiding government armouries for guns that should really belong to the military. And if that wasn’t disloyal and unpatriotic enough, Erasmus has accepted a secret offer from a sinister Nazi fifth-columnist called Beckett, played by Tim Roth, to help distribute counterfeit currency which will destroy the economy and make Blighty easier to invade. Doesn’t Erasmus know what Adolf Hitler is going to do to his own Romani people? (To be fair to Erasmus, a lot of the poshest and most well-connected people in the land didn’t either.)
Clearly, Tommy is going to have to come down there and sort this mess out. And we get a very ripe scene in which soft-spoken Tommy turns up in the pub full of raucous idiots who cheek him. “Who the faaaaaack is ‘Tommy Shelby’?” sneers one lairy squaddie, who gets horribly schooled on that very subject.
In this movie, Tommy Shelby is against the Nazis, and he can’t get to be more of a good guy than that. (Tommy has evidently put behind him memories of Winston Churchill from the first two series, when Churchill was dead set on clamping down on the Peaky Blinders.) The war and the Nazis are a big theme for a big-screen treatment and screenwriter Knight and director Tom Harper put it across with some gusto as a kind of homefront war film, helped by their effortlessly watchable lead. Maybe you have to be fully invested in the TV show to really like it, although this canonisation of Tommy is a sentimental treatment of what we actually know of crime gangs in the second world war. Nevertheless, it is a resoundingly confident drama.
Running free during a game of catch on the empty field at SoFi Stadium is a fantasy most Angelenos will never experience. For comedians Jo Koy and Gabriel Iglesias, it’s just a warm-up to a dream that’s been a lifetime in the making.
Gripping the football with fingers covered in Filipino tribal tattoos extending in a sleeve up his arm, Koy looks across the expanse of emerald green turf at his son jogging toward the south end zone of the Inglewood stadium on a recent afternoon. “To be able to throw at SoFi is crazy,” Koy said with a sparkling grin of bright white veneers.
The 54-year-old comedian with a beard full of gray stubble drops back to pass, launching a tight spiral underneath SoFi’s massive technicolor halo scoreboard hovering above a sea of empty stands. Joseph Jr. — a wiry 22-year-old with a head full of curly dark brown hair — runs briskly toward the goal line with a black cast on his left arm. He raises his right arm just in time to scoop it into his chest for a touchdown. The imaginary crowd goes wild.
“Yes!!!” Koy shouts, his excitement echoing in the stadium. He jogs over to Joseph in his navy blue coverall jumpsuit and L.A. Dodgers cap to deliver a satisfying father-son chest bump.
A few yards away, Iglesias is watching Roka, his tiny black chihuahua, dart around the field like four pounds of rambunctious entitlement. The plus-sized comedian — better known as “Fluffy” — is sporting his typical loose-fitting vintage Hawaiian shirt, denim shorts and black flat cap. Whenever they stand together, the duo’s dynamic is like a modern-day Laurel and Hardy.
Nearly 70% of tickets for Koy and Iglesias’ SoFi show sold within days, making this the largest stadium stand-up performance to date.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“The fact that we’ve known each other as long as we have is wild … we’ve known each other since we both had hair,” Iglesias, 49, says as they both lift up their caps in unison, laughing and exposing their shiny bald heads.
On March 21, this stadium will be filled with more than 70,000 guests as the pair takes center stage at the Super Bowl of comedy — the largest stadium stand-up show to date. Koy and Iglesias are now part of a small fraternity of comics, including Kevin Hart, Dane Cook, Bill Burr and Larry the Cable Guy, who’ve sold out stadiums across the country.
The one-night-only show, which won’t be televised or recorded as a special, is meant to be one giant party for comedy fans who’ve supported Koy and Iglesias since their early days. The comics will be passing the mic back and forth throughout the night, which will feature special guests, surprise moments and plenty of other unplanned interruptions that will make for a roughly four-hour show. Though the L.A. comedy scene tends to exist in the shadow of Hollywood, this feat managed by two of its biggest names puts a historic spotlight on stand-up.
“It’s more sweet because it’s taken so long,” Iglesias said. “This wasn’t an overnight thing. Nowadays, everybody wants everything so fast. Between the two of us, we’ve got about 60 years of comedy experience.”
“It’s insane. I can’t explain it,” Koy adds, staring up at the stadium’s glass roof, preparing to crack it with decibels of laughter. “Every time we come in here and look up, I’m like, ‘There’s going to be a stage here the size of the end zone.’ We took the stage from the arenas that we normally play and injected steroids into it.”
For comedians who’ve witnessed their ascent, which now literally includes hands and feet cemented in front of TCL Chinese Theatre and a star for Fluffy on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the journey has been incredible to watch.
“It’s huge for stand-up, it used to be just in dingy clubs and bars and always something small and intimate and kinda like an afterthought,” said fellow comedy star Tiffany Haddish, a longtime friend to both Koy and Iglesias. “To be honest I never thought comedy would be this big.”
Jay Leno, a confidant to Iglesias and the man who inspired him to start his own insane car collection and offered Koy his first late-night appearance on “The Tonight Show,” agrees that a show like this is a huge step for comedy.
“My attitude when I came to this town was if you can’t get in through the front door, go in the back door,” Leno said. “And they didn’t do it the traditional way, they got to where they are as comedians, one audience member at a time.”
For the two L.A. comedians, the historic milestone represents decades of work and signals comedy’s arrival in mainstream entertainment venues.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
When the pair of arena-selling comics announced last year they’d be joining forces to perform at SoFi, the task of filling the massive concert venue and football stadium seemed laughable. But within a week, it clearly wasn’t a joke. Nearly 70% of the tickets were sold just days after going on sale. Now, weeks before the gig, the show is completely sold out with more seats being added. If there’s one person who is not necessarily surprised, it’s Iglesias. By his calculations — including his ability to sell out Dodger Stadium twice for the filming of his 2022 Netflix special, “Stadium Fluffy,” and Koy’s ability to sell out the Forum a record-setting six consecutive times (more than any other comedian) — the math checked out.
“At a certain point it’s like we’ve been doing [huge stand-up shows] for so many years, it becomes normal,” Iglesias said. “What do you do to change things? What do you do to grow? The worst thing that happens is it fails. But at least we know we tried it. Then we know what our ceiling is. But as of now, this isn’t the ceiling.”
Despite the logic, looking at the stadium’s massive seating chart during an initial meeting with the venue made the task feel akin to climbing Mt. Everest.
“SoFi is the size of like five Forums. That seating chart on a wall was the most discouraging thing I could possibly look at,” Koy said. “And then looking at the amount of money it was gonna cost us even before we sell one ticket. Me and Gabe should’ve been looking at that and been like, ‘What … are we thinking? Hell nah we ain’t doing this … !’”
It took more than a little convincing from Iglesias to get Koy on board. “[Jo] does not like change. I had to break down the math for him and I pushed it a lot,” Iglesias said. “And I’m glad we did because now that it’s sold out, the hard part is over. We just have to show up and deliver a kick-ass show. And then we can both celebrate after, crack a couple bottles and I know I’m taking a week off after that.”
Unlike a typical arena show, which takes several months to coordinate, their big night at SoFi required a full year of planning. The production and stage will be three times the size of the comedians’ normal stages and will be managed by the same team that produces stadium shows for acts like Los Bukis and Bad Bunny.
“It’s more sweet because it’s taken so long,” Iglesias said. “This wasn’t an overnight thing. Nowadays, everybody wants everything so fast. Between the two of us, we’ve got about 60 years of comedy experience.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“It’s almost like a chessboard,” Iglesias said. “You got to do a bunch of moves in order to pull something like this off, it’s not just we’re gonna do it. This took a lot of planning, a lot of coordinating.”
When asked how the tickets could’ve possibly moved so fast, outside of typical avenues of good marketing and promotion, Koy says it was really comedy fans making a statement of support for them and for stand-up.
“There’s no such thing as marketing on this one, to me it’s a phenom,” he said, noting the pride both he and Iglesias have to see the excitement and support from local fans, especially Filipino and Latin communities across L.A. that have been a major part of their respective fanbases. “That type of reaction and that response to us saying we’re gonna be at SoFi is almost like a bragging right and it’s ‘our night, we’re gonna be there, I don’t care where we’re sitting.’”
The SoFi gig was conceived in February of 2024 during Koy’s sixth sold-out show at Kia Forum. In the hoopla of Koy breaking his own audience record at the venue, Iglesias crashed the show, presented his friend with a plaque and laid down the gauntlet in front of 17,500 fans. When Iglesias asked Koy if they should contemplate performing “across the street” together, the crowd erupted with excitement.
“Our agents and managers were like, ‘Are you sure you wanna do that?’’’ Iglesias said. “I think they missed a couple bonuses. But at the end of the day, it’s part of history.”
“That’s what’s beautiful about Gabe, he’s not scared to take on those big risks,” Koy said. “But the whole thing was a risk. We gotta alter our tour dates and sacrifice other opportunities to make this happen.”
“Every time we come in here and look up, I’m like, ‘There’s going to be a stage here the size of the end zone,‘” Koy said about the upcoming SoFi show on Mar. 21. “We took the stage from the arenas that we normally play and injected steroids into it.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
For Koy, a life of comedy was a risk inspired by his heroes while growing up in Tacoma, Wash. He traces it back to being 15 and seeing Eddie Murphy perform at Climate Pledge Arena during his “Raw” tour in Seattle. He remembers taking a panoramic look at the sold-out crowd roaring in the darkness before the leather-suited legend even took the stage. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, this guy got this many people in here?’ I just thought that was the most impossible thing,” Koy remembers. “And now I get to share this moment with my son and let him walk with me and let him see that this is possible.”
When Koy was moving up the comedy ranks under his real name Joseph Glenn Herbert, the thought of calling himself a comedian felt like a pipe dream. Koy, the son of a white father and Filipina mother, saw comedy as a way to channel an overactive personality and need to make people laugh into a career. Going from coffee shop open mics in Tacoma to clubs and casinos in Las Vegas in 1989, Koy scratched out a living doing random jobs to move to L.A. in 2001 with hopes of making it big.
Working at a bank or Nordstrom Rack offered some stability as he drove up and down Sunset Boulevard in his battered Honda Prelude with one broken headlight, looking for a way forward to pursue his passion. Haddish, his longtime friend, spent years working with Koy, who served as her mentor at the Laugh Factory. Between sets on stage, the two would often take breaks to fantasize about fame.
“Jo and I would sit outside of the Laugh Factory and have these conversations and we’d be eating hot dogs wrapped in bacon and we’d be dreaming about being in a big movie, playing big theaters and helping people heal through laughter,” Haddish said. “Now here we are.”
“At the end of the day, this is a big stamp. And I think it also lets other comics know, ‘Hey, man, step up your game. Let’s grow this,’” Iglesias said.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Pulling off a show of this magnitude is jaw-dropping to think about, Iglesias said, even after having achieved a similar feat just a few years ago at Dodgers Stadium where he filmed his special over the course of two shows. He also set a record for fines incurred by a performer for going over his allotted time slot (a hefty $250,000 for not leaving the venue until 4 a.m.). The SoFi gig leaves him only one shot to get it right. This time around, Iglesias feels infinitely less pressure despite the bigger venue.
“[Dodger Stadium] for me was grueling,” Iglesias said. “I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know how it was gonna go. Every day we were pulling our hair out trying to figure it out. Fortunately we were still able to pull it off and we learned a lot from it. This time around, believe me when I tell you the stress of this show is not even there.”
Iglesias, a native of Long Beach, has spent over 30 years rising up the comedy ranks. Among his accomplishments are seven major comedy specials, a TV show (“Mr. Iglesias”) and becoming the first Mexican American comic with a top-grossing worldwide tour. Like Koy, who also has seven major specials, Iglesias went through a lot of metamorphosis on stage prior to finding his calling as a gregarious, fun-loving comedian with a penchant for doing cartoon-ish voices.
Leno says one of the key factors in Fluffy’s mass appeal is his likability.
“The great thing about Gabriel is that the kindness comes across, there’s not a mean spirit in his body,” he said. “There’s a lot of comics who are really funny but people don’t like them because they think they’re mean-spirited. … When you watch Gabe even when he does something that’s not fall-down hysterical, you smile because you like him. … I find him a joy to watch.”
Much of what Iglesias learned about marketing himself was inspired by the WWE. The costumes, witty banter and theatrics of the wrestling ring influenced his consistent look and even allowed the name “Fluffy” to become his calling card.
Comedians Gabriel Iglesias, aka, “Fluffy,” in front, and Jo Koy are photographed at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on February 10, 2026, ahead of their March 21st show.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“There is a certain level of pandemonium, as they say in wrestling, that’s needed to get people excited,” Iglesias said. “Then there’s the marketing and the way that you do it — so I did study wrestling a lot.”
Handing the kingdom of SoFi over to the court jesters for a night is a feat worthy of celebration.
“At the end of the day, this is a big stamp. And I think it also lets other comics know, ‘Hey, man, step up your game. Let’s grow this,’” Iglesias said. “And it’s not, ‘Step up your game,’ like we’re competing with each other. It’s more so like, ‘Let’s elevate the game of comedy.’”
Right now Koy feels plenty elevated, as though he’s floating every time he enters the stadium and looks up at the stands — like the night he saw Eddie Murphy all those years ago.
“You should’ve heard the whispers me and Gabe had to ourselves walking out of the stadium tunnel, like, ‘Yo, is this really happening?!’” Koy said with a megawatt smile. “Coming from an open mic night at a coffee house, never in my wildest dreams did I say, ‘Someday, a football stadium’ … we’re literally living our dreams right now.”
That’s both a promise and a challenge she delivers, since what follows may rub some viewers the wrong way. Yet Gyllenhaal’s full-throttle commitment to her vision is compelling in and of itself, and she has marshalled an absolutely smashing-looking and -sounding production. The story proper begins in 1936 Chicago, which, like everything and everyplace else in the movie, has been luminously shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher and sumptuously conjured by production designer Karen Murphy. Her involvement is appropriate given that her previous credits include Bradley Cooper’s A STAR IS BORN and Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, since among other things, THE BRIDE! is a nostalgic musical. Its Frankenstein (Christian Bale), who has taken the name of his maker, is obsessed with big-screen tuners, and imagines himself in elaborate song-and-dance numbers. (Considering the reception to JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX, one must applaud the daring of Warner Bros. for greenlighting another expensive film in which a tormented protagonist has that kind of fantasy life.)
THE BRIDE! may be revisionist on many levels, but its characterization of its “monster” holds true to past screen incarnations from Karloff’s to Elordi’s: His scarred appearance masks a lonely soul who desires companionship. Frankenstein has arrived in Chicago to seek out Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), correctly believing she has the scientific know-how to create an appropriate mate for him. Rather than piece one together, Dr. Euphronious resurrects the corpse of Ida (Jessie Buckley), whose consorting with underworld types led to her brutal death. Previously chafing against the man’s world she inhabited in life, she becomes even more defiant and unruly as a revenant, apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley herself, declaiming in free-associative sentences and quoting rebellious literature.
Buckley, currently an Oscar favorite for her very different literary-inspired role in HAMNET, tears into the role of the Bride (who now goes by the name Penny) with invigorating abandon that bursts off the screen. Unsure of her identity yet overflowing with self-confident bravado, she’s the opposite of the sensitive “Frank,” but they’re united by the world that stands against them. That becomes literal when a violent incident sends them on the lam, road-tripping to New York City and beyond, on a trail inspired by the films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), Frank’s favorite song-and-dance-man star.
With THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal has made a film that’s at once her very own and a feverish homage to all sorts of cinema past and present. It’s a horror story, a lovers-on-the-run movie, a crime thriller, a musical and more, and historical fealty be damned if it makes for a good scene (as when Penny and Frank sneak into a 3D movie over a decade before such features became popular). In-references are everywhere: It might just be a coincidence that the couple’s travels take them past Fredonia, NY (cf. “Freedonia” in the Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP), but it’s certainly no accident that the former Ida is targeted by a crime boss named Lupino, referencing the actress and pioneering filmmaker whose works included noirs and women’s-issues stories. Penny’s exploits lead legions of admiring women to adopt her look and anarchic attitude, echoing the first JOKER (while a headline calls them “Twisted Sisters”), and the use of one Irving Berlin song in a Frankensteinian context immediately recalls a classic comedic take on the property.
Whether the audience should be put in mind of a spoof at a key point in a film with different goals is another matter. At times like these, Gyllenhaal’s pastiche ambitions overtake emotional investment in the story. As strong as the two lead performances are (Bale is quite moving, conveying a great deal of soul from behind his extensive prosthetics), it’s easier to feel for them in individual scenes than during the entire course of the just-over-two-hour running time. The diversions can be entertaining, to be sure, but they also result in an uncertainty of tone. The dissonance continues straight through to the end, where the filmmaker’s choice of closing-credits song once again suggests we’re not supposed to take all this too seriously.
There’s nonetheless much to admire and enjoy about THE BRIDE!, and this kind of risk-taking by a major studio is always to be encouraged (especially considering that we’ll see how long that lasts at Warner Bros. once Paramount takes it over). Beyond the terrific work by the aforementioned actors, there’s fine support from Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as detectives on Penny and Frank’s heels, with Sandy Powell’s lavish costumes and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s rich, varied score vital to fashioning this fully imagined world. Kudos also to makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey and to Chris Gallaher and Scott Stoddard, who did those honors on Frank, for their visceral, evocative work. Uneven as it may be, THE BRIDE! is also as alive! as any film you’ll likely see this year.
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