Melbourne drag royalty Art Simone was one of the stars of the most recent series of Drag Race Down Under. Eliza Janssen sits down with Simone for a Drag Race post-mortem.
Drag Race Down Under was a true-blue dinky-di rollercoaster, populating the hugely successful reality TV format with queens from Australia and New Zealand. Melbourne drag royalty Art Simone might have had the most turbulent ride of all, going home in episode two only to return and slay the show’s all-important reading challenge and runways.
As a Drag Race post-mortem, Simone spoke with us about how her “Australian-isms” may have been misunderstood by the show’s international fanbase, what she’s been up to after the competition, and that pie-scoffing talent performance. The full first season of Drag Race Down Under is currently streaming on Stan.
How has your Pride Month been! Have you still been able to get out and celebrate despite lockdown in Melbourne?
Not really! Everything’s digital at the moment, so there’s been some digital events. It was kind of like Drag Race happening, chuck in a bit of a lockdown in there, and here we are. It’s been fabulous, it’s been nice seeing the rest of the world get to celebrate this time. But it does sort of spill into July, I’m doing a digital pride event tomorrow. So Pride Month doesn’t just have to be June.
You can be gay every other month of the year too apparently.
I’ve heard that, not sure about it though…
One thing I’ve loved during Pride Month is your Art Therapy series on YouTube, was that a way of unpacking from Drag Race?
It was a way to unpack and a way to take ownership of my own narrative as well—because it’s a TV show and it has to be edited, some compromises have to be made in that process. So it was a great way for me to be taking back control and literally working through some issues. I wasn’t allowed to do a proper recap show which is how I came up with the idea of doing Art Therapy, which was sort of a left-of-centre wink-wink, nudge-nudge way to hint things every week, but still getting to have fun and inject some comedy into it. Plus I got to smash things and that’s always fun as well.
Going back to episode one, you repped Melbourne so well with your hometown look—what are the elements of Melbourne and Australian drag that you wanted to get across during the show?
I think we did get a lot across, it’s whether it was interpreted or celebrated as much as I wish it should’ve been. I think that was something I got a bit sad about towards the end. International audiences were like, “oh they’re all so meeean! I don’t get it, she’s just wearing a jumper with an ugly koala on it, how ugly!” So many times, some really fun Australian-isms and references to our drag weren’t given the best…they weren’t received the best which is such a shame. Because we’re known for being loud and crass and silly, and we tell it how it is, and we’re just go-getters, but I think in the world of Drag Race that hasn’t been experienced on such a scale.
But that was a big positive of the show; from the Broken Heel festival for example, you guys do seemingly all know each other closely, which is why the reading challenge went so well.
I don’t know why they cut that out. The first day when everyone was walking into the Werk Room, we were all like, ‘HEY!’, we all knew each other .
Australia is big, but the drag scene is small, so I’d either worked with or were friends with basically everybody in that room, yet they cut that out. So from day one, we were like cut-throat because we’re all friends, and you’ll have a bigger dig at someone that you’re comfortable and close with. I work with Jojo Zaho at the Broken Heel Festival, I’ve worked with Karen From Finance for years, worked with Kita and Anita, Etcetera Etcetera, Coco Jumbo, Maxi Shield—the only one I hadn’t worked with was Electra Shock, but I’d seen her in Kita and Anita’s House of Drag show, so we all knew each other.
It could’ve been celebrated a little bit differently, it was such a great insight to what drag queens are like in the dressing room before going out on stage, that’s the energy we were giving. “You look like a dog”, “yeah well, you look like a foot, fuck off!” But if you add that rattlesnake sound effect behind everything, it sounds so mean.
“Why are they being so cruel??!”
“She doesn’t actually look like a dog, how dare they?!”
Did you have any favourite reads that didn’t make it into the final edit? Because your read for Etcetera Etcetera was like the only funny joke about pronouns I’ve ever heard.
It was a way to educate, and like I said, Etcetera’s my friend so I knew I could go there. I was like “RuPaul, you ever wonder why your husband left Perth? Too much trash”. And I pointed at Scarlett. Poor dog.
The library is open OFFICIALLY 👏 Closing out #DragRaceDownUnder's first reading challenge in herstory: @ArtSimone, @ScarletAdamsDQ, and @elektrashocknz! @wowpresentsplus https://t.co/JVQcxfvXEF pic.twitter.com/yMrVhiwGa6
— World of Wonder (@WorldOfWonder) May 29, 2021
You’re officially the only ‘comeback queen’ who has ever been eliminated from a season and then ended up a finalist. Has making it to the end made your elimination easier, looking back?
No!
It doesn’t sweeten it up at all?
I think making it to the end cements that it was the wrong decision in the first place! But unfortunately now I have this asterisk next to my name like “yeah but you got eliminated so it doesn’t count.” I’m proud and excited that I got to the end, but it’s the game. It’s a tough game, and you never know what’s going to happen. You’ve just got to smile and roll with it, and make some TV.
What was the experience of filming like, compared to watching the series be released around the world?
I mean I’ve blocked most of the experience out. I have a diary with lots of notes. Watching it back you get a bigger picture, because we don’t know what any of the other queens are saying in their confessionals, or what the judges say when we leave the stage, so that was of course surprising. Everything kind of happened the same way, the only thing is it was so fast-paced to watch it back, which is really crazy, comparing like, “we did that for four hours and here it’s cut down to about fifteen seconds.”
A lot of past contestants say that about Snatch Game, that you’re filming all day and only have one or two jokes actually make it to air.
Snatch Game didn’t actually run that long which is surprising—they just cut out everyone’s answers so you only got one or two actually shown. It was definitely longer than that, but I remember it was over all of a sudden. It was really just the four questions times eight of us – maybe it did go for hours! I just remember being like, “oh my god it’s done! Are we finished?” We just couldn’t believe it was happening, that whole day was a blur. They announced it in the morning, we freaked out, had five minutes to reset, Ru came into the room, five minutes after that we were putting our makeup on, and then we were on set like “oh my gooood”…It was a rollercoaster.
Speaking of moments that may have been misinterpreted by the international fanbase. I felt like, in the talent show, your talent of fitting entire pies and lamingtons in your mouth is the definition of a talent, it’s something not everybody can do…
I mean you said it! I think people got really hung up on the word ‘talent’: if you’re breaking it down my talent was comedy, and the food were props in a comedy routine, a clowning routine essentially. Yet the same audiences laugh at what Yara Sofia just did (in the US All Stars Season 6).
Which is also just great prop comedy –
Other people were like “all you did was eat!!” Actually if you roll back the footage, I didn’t eat anything, the talent is that I can put a whole pie in my mouth and pull it out untouched. It was even misunderstood that it was a meat pie and lamingtons, like some commenters said, “all you did was put a custard tart in your mouth!” I did everything for an Australian audience because that’s my home, that’s my family, that’s the people I want to please and give visibility to. We’ve had 13 years of Drag Race with American-adjacent style drag—I didn’t want to go up there and do an American version of an Australian drag queen, I think that’s a wasted opportunity.
There are many times when I was rehearsing everything where I was like, “will they get it?” Well am I pandering to two American judges, or am I presenting a product for the wider audience? At the end of the day, they’re the ones that come to shows and support me, and appreciate that visibility. I guess some of my choices shot me in the foot a few times but I don’t regret any of them. I went in there gung-ho going, “this is what I love to do!” I would agree, a talent is something everyone can’t do, and I made Ru, Michelle, Rhys, and everybody else laugh, that’s all it was about. A lot of people’s reactions were, “I didn’t really get it, I laughed though.”
“Then you got it.”
I do a lot of work at fringe festivals, Spiegeltent, cabaret, that’s the style of performance I do. I’m not going to go out there and do fifty death drops, because that’s not my style of drag.
Tell me more about your finale look, it seemed like this extension of your blue hair in your confessionals look – it was gorgeous.
It was exactly that. I’ve done so many gowns in my drag career, and I was trying to think for ‘Best Drag, what’s a silhouette I’ve never ever done? I was like, “I want to feel my little-girl-birthday-cake-Cinderella-princess dreams”. I wanted an outfit that I’m so excited to put on to walk down that runway, I want an outfit that’s semi-comfortable. Because it’s a big skirt, I wanted something that wasn’t constricting around my legs so I could move and I could feel comfy. And then was like, well, it has to be blue. That’s my favourite colour, it’s me to a tee. We went out and sourced all these beautiful materials complimenting that aquamarine, turquoise colour I like so much.
Some people did complain like, “wow it’s so simple for you.” What do you want from me??! “Maybe you could’ve had like paint dripping down”. I’ve done that! This is me presenting something I’ve never done before, and the blue is what made it me. The camera didn’t really display everything perfectly, there was like thousands of crystals all over it, beautiful beadwork and everything. But at the end of the day it wasn’t the camera that was judging me, it was the judges in the room.
What would ‘Art Simone’s Drag Race’ look like?
Art Simone’s Drag Race. Oh my goodness. The first round would be Goon of Fortune, that’d be good for the mini challenge, and for the maxi challenge, you’d have to do fruit-inspired headpiece to get your TAFE certificate 3. And then we’d dump them off in the middle of the desert and they’d have to find their way to Broken Heel. I think we’d really have some fun. Be a mix of Survivor a bit as well – Survivor meets Amazing Race meets Drag Race.
Nice. What would be the Lip Sync For Your Life song choice?
It would have be ‘I Will Survive’.
Because literally they may not survive.
It would just play on repeat the entire time to really torture them until they finally reach their destination, we’ve worked it out. I’m going to start pitching it to the networks now.
