Season 17 of RuPaul’s Drag Race arrives Friday and with it comes new twists, drama, and a breathtakingly revamped main stage. This season’s refreshed “Rate-A-Queen” twist already has fans buzzing, alongside another twist called the “The Badonka Dunk Tank,” which sees Michelle Visage on top of a dunk tank as the queens choose levers to stay in the competition.
The queens of Season 17– Acacia Forgot, Arrietty, Crystal Envy, Hormona Lisa, Jewels Sparkles, Joella, Kori King, Lana Ja’Rae, Lexi Love, Lucky Starzzz, Lydia B Kollins, Onya Nurve, Sam Star and Suzie Toot, teased what to expect from “Rate-A-Queen” and the dunk tank when they spoke once again to Blavity’s Shadow and Act when they visited the pop-up Mariah Carey Holiday Bar at New York City’s Virgin Hotel in Manhattan.
Does strategy play in “Rate-A-Queen” this season?
The “Rate-A-Queen” twist challenged contestants to rank one another’s performances, stirring up a whirlwind of emotions and strategies.
Lana Ja’Rae navigated the twist with careful thought and a touch of strategy. “I didn’t want to do anything malicious because I didn’t want to hurt anybody or try to bring anybody down,” she explained. “But I wanted to try to save people that I knew others would try to bring down, in hopes that they would rate me higher. I’d do them a favor, and they’d do me a favor, so we would both win in the end.”
For Kori King, the twist was all about embracing the chaos. “Personally, I had fun with it,” she said. “There were some people I thought others would put in the top, and some people you just put in the bottom for fun. At the end of the day, it’s drag. So I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to enjoy myself and have fun at the expense of others.’”
Acacia Forgot approached the twist with sensitivity. “I’m a very sensitive person, and I really hold on to what people think about me and say about me—almost too much. So I went into it trying to be very fair because I wouldn’t want to make someone feel bad.”
Meanwhile, Sam Star was torn between strategy and honesty. “You’re thinking, ‘Do you play fair, or do you try to do a Big Brother or Survivor moment?’ That could be fierce for this episode, but then you wonder if it’s going to bite you in the ass down the road,” she said. “But I think we all decided to just be honest about our opinions. What’s fair to someone might not be fair to someone else.” As seen in the trailer, she was also ready to have discussions about folks’ votes. “We definitely discussed it,” she said. “I wanted to get to the bottom of what I went down. But opinions are subjective and if they thought I was the worst, it hurt my feelings, but I just had to prove to them that I wasn’t the worst.”
For Jewels Sparkles, years of watching Drag Race informed her strategy. “There’s always a twist, and things are never going to be the same as last season,” she said. “So I played the game the way I thought was right and stayed fair because I had a feeling these bitches would find out exactly how we voted. But if that wasn’t the case, I’d have been shaking.”
Lexi Love shared a similar philosophy. “Like I said in my Meet the Queens, I want to beat the best. So I literally did it as fairly as I could, just because if I had the opportunity to be in the top, I wanted to compete against somebody in the top. Clock that tea.”
Other queens found the twist frustrating, particularly when alliances formed. “I think I was a little annoyed going into it,” Onya Nurve admitted. “I didn’t know anybody, so I didn’t have a reason not to be fair. But I knew some of the girls knew each other, so I knew they’d have a little strategy. That annoyed me, but that’s how the cookie crumbled.”
Hormona Lisa explained her criteria, saying, “I look at the polish of drag. Coming from pageants, how you look is just as important as what you do on stage.” Similarly, Lucky Starzz aimed to be fair but admitted, “I looked out for some girls who looked out for me.”
Suzie Toot, reflecting on last season, said she approached the twist cautiously. “Last year, Plane Jane got away with it when votes weren’t revealed. So my thought was, ‘Oh, they’re absolutely going to expose us this year.’ I had to be really careful about how I rated the queens.”
The new main stage: Bigger and bolder
If the Rate-A-Queen twist wasn’t enough, the revamped main stage added an entirely new layer to the competition. The massive space and high-tech design left many queens in awe—and on edge.
Acacia Forgot initially missed the familiarity of the iconic stage. “I was sad at first, but once we walked it, I was like, ‘Oh no, this is better.’ It was fierce.”
Lana Ja’Rae found the change disorienting yet thrilling. “It took away a lot of the familiarity of the stage. You watch the show, and you plan for that stage. Then you arrive, and it’s like, ‘Oh wait.’ It’s kind of gaggy because it takes you back a little bit. But I’m grateful we were the first cast to perform on such a beautiful stage.”
The technological upgrades didn’t go unnoticed. “You can create a set with just the stage lighting,” said Crystal Envy. “It has so much more than just, ‘This is a stage with cool lights.’ It’s a whole new level.”
For Jewels Sparkles, adjusting to the scale of the new stage proved challenging. “I had a mental picture of what the stage would be like, and the adrenaline was insane. I was running in all sorts of directions that were not correct—tripping. It was a mess.”
Sam Star described the space as intimidating yet exhilarating. “I think it was probably bigger than the one before. And I’d like to see anyone else in that huge room with RuPaul staring at you. But it was fabulous.”
Onya Nurve saw the stage as a symbol of the season’s innovation. “Everything this season was new—new stage, new twists, new everything. I was so excited for us to be the first of the new shit.”
Lydia B. Kollins appreciated the departure from tradition. “The iconic stage is intimidating, but ours relieved a layer of pressure. It looked nothing like it does on TV.” Meanwhile, Hormona Lisa found the challenge exhilarating. “It’s the perfect place to show polish. If you’re not polished, that stage will tell on you.”
Michelle Visage and the “Badonka Dunk Tank”: An soon-to-be iconic twist?
The “Badonka Dunk Tank” was another unforgettable addition this season. For the queens, it was both shocking and hilarious.
“When they said Michelle had something else to do, I thought she was meeting Jesus or something,” joked Hormona Lisa. “But then we saw her in a dunk tank, and I was like, ‘Are we going to watch her sedate one of us?’”
Crystal Envy shared a surprising detail: “You can’t tell how high up she is in the footage. In person, she’s like 20 feet in the air. And the tank of water—it’s six or seven feet tall. When she gets in, she goes all the way down.”
Lana Ja’Rae was equally stunned. “When we noticed she was missing from the panel, we wondered where she was. Never in my mind did I think she’d be sitting in a dunk tank. But then again, why wouldn’t there be a dunk tank on Drag Race?”
Suzie Toot added a lighter note, praising Michelle’s look. “She looked so good. The only thing on my mind was, ‘God damn, I wish I could wear a leopard print bodycon like that.’”
RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 17 premieres Friday at 8 p.m. on MTV.
