Darienne Lake is like a jar of marmite. Full bodied and of a taste you either love or loathe. John Brock caught up with the buxom legend who not only broke Drag Race history as the first plus size queen to make it into the top four, but also the longest running ‘peoples choice’ nominee, to talk about her drag race experiences, share some secrets and her 23 years in the game and what really went down between her and Ben De La Creme.

Welcome to London, Darienne. How are you enjoying your stay?
Meh, it’s alright. [Laughs] No, seriously, I am having the greatest time. I am so fortunate to have met Loverboy and get the real ins and outs of London. Like, not just touristy stuff but to really, you know, be in some basement pub, drinking with drag queens, screaming and singing off key. It’s the culture behind the pictures.

Everyone has this preconception of you from RuPaul’s Drag Race. How have you been received over here?
I think it’s really funny. I don’t think a lot of people were enthusiastic about it and were like, ‘Meh, here she is,’ but then I got a chance to go so many places and meet so many people and they were like, ‘Oh it’s her!’ Once they got to talk to me, they were like, ‘Okay, maybe I misjudged this person and they are actually quite delightful, and witty, and funny. A lot of people don’t get my humour. It’s like when you read a text message. But once people meet me they see I am completely harmless.

Do you think that is what happened on the show?
Definitely. Especially when you add in all the ‘shade sounds’ and all that, you can make any situation seem different. Someone could tell a joke but then if you add silence after it, it looks like it bombed. My grandmother always used to say, ‘Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see’.

Do you feel the show made you look bad?
I have no problem with the way I was portrayed because I am still getting to live this great life and see so many things. Do I wish it was a better edit than what I had? Yes. But I am still thankful for it. It still was a fantastic opportunity and a learning experience – especially of how to act in the future.

You have been in the game for over 20 years now, has that longevity made you harder to the critics?
I have been doing drag since I was 18, almost 24 years now, and if I was really such a rotten cunt I would not be doing drag now. I think a lot of who I am is because I have been in the business so long. You just don’t have time for the bullshit. I think, ‘We are still men here – don’t come at me with whiny bullshit’. There are a lot of young queens who get the ‘young queen attitude’ and think their shit don’t stink. If they stay in the business and look back at their early pictures they will feel humbled.

If you were to give any advice to any young queens what would it be?
For a young queen my best advice is to explore your love of drag and do your own thing and not worry about what other people think of you.

Touching on that, on Drag Race there was this whole thing between you and Milk, as a non-traditional queen, and you saying you didn’t ‘get it’…
They played it up that way. It is one of the specific editing things I had a problem with as my original phrase was ‘I know a lot of people will look at Milk and not get it. But I do because she reminds me of a close friend of mine called Ambrosia Salad who has never tried to look like a woman – she is all glitter, 6ft 9” and worth the climb. Milk is so full of colour and is so bright.’ They edited it so that it appeared that I looked at Milk and was like ‘I don’t get it’. But Milk and I had a good relationship on and off the show and she knew I never doubted her drag.

What exactly happened between you and Ben De La Crème?
It was exactly the same thing with Ben De La Crème. We got on really well in reality and worked really well together. They just edited the show to make it seem like it was a bigger thing than it really was. She wrote me a really sweet note when she left and she put it in my makeup box. I should put it online so people can see it for themselves.

Everyone was coming for you on Twitter after that.
That’s the thing – she came to my defence when so many people were horrible to me. She knew it was not my choice to come across the way they chose. With any good show they kill off characters before their time to make you really shocked or amazed cos it is good TV.

You won the Reading Challenge so it’s not as if you don’t know how to handle yourself…
You know, when it came to the reading challenge I was able to read them to filth because I was given a day to prepare – I am more of a crafter of a joke. That’s why I did so well on the comedy challenge – even Bianca was worried because she doesn’t go out there and just tell jokes, she works off a crowd. It’s something I learnt early on. An older queen said to me once, ‘You can be pretty, but artwork is pretty on the wall and no one wants to sit there and stare at it for 45mins’. So if you can grab that mic and entertain them, you got it.

Like when they said Courtney ‘was resting on pretty’?
Right! They were like, ‘You are pretty but we want you to entertain us’ and the edit was a disservice to her because in a lot of the challenges she was fucking funny. As I said before, everyone plays to their strengths. Look at Raja, she knows how to put an outfit together and she is the perfect model. But do I think she is the greatest entertainer? No. But then you look at someone like Ivy Winters who can really perfect her makeup and her outfits, and she is so talented and she can juggle and spew fire and she is a great entertainer but then in the show she didn’t come across as such a great character. Also, we really didn’t get to see a lipsync challenge for example, and that’s how you would be able to see how a queen entertains a crowd.

Well Bianca isn’t a lip syncer, is she?
She’s not. She only lip-synced once. It wasn’t the best but that is not her thing. She has done it, but she is great at entertaining and grabbing the mic, hosting a show and keeping her audience engaged. It’s like if you went to see Lady Gaga and she wanted to do a comedy set you’d be like ‘Nooooo. That is not what I am here for!”

Do you think Gaga would be funny?
[Laughs] You know what, I think she would be hilarious. Annie Lennox could read me the phone book and I’d be entertained.

Every season we see cliques forming but you, Courtney, Bianca and Adore are still really close. Tell us about that.
We truly became very close, as close as brothers and sisters really. After the show we had a group text and some of the girls asked to be pulled out as they couldn’t deal with all the messages all the time, but me, Adore, Bianca and Courtney… we kept our group. At first we were like our own on-call therapists and when you reached out to somebody there would be someone there for you. It was funny because Bianca would be off doing something and she would come back and she’d be like ‘I have just turned on my phone and I have 72 fucking text messages – FUCK ALL OF YOU’. She is always so funny.

About that – how did you feel about getting into the top four when so many people on Twitter were saying you wouldn’t make it past week one?
As soon as they announced the cast, people were like, ‘How does it feel to be eliminated first?’ and I was like ‘Ok…well, guess what, if you talk shit, one day you are gonna have to eat your words. Yeah! Eat shit. And not eat shit and die, eat shit and live so you can live with the painful fucking memory you had to eat shit’. Opinions are like assholes – everybody’s got one.

So tell us about you. Where did you get your name from?
These two old queens painted my face for the first time and it was around the time the movie ‘Heathers’ was out and ‘Hairspray!’ was big news. I wanted to be called ‘Heather Sky’ but they both told me that it didn’t suit me and that I looked a lot like Ricki Lake, who was Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. I didn’t want the name ‘Turnblad’ but liked ‘Lake’ so kept that. Then we thought that it was funny because there is an amusement park where I live called Darien Lake, so it’s inspired by that. It suits me because I am quite the ride – two tonnes of fun, twisted steel and sex appeal.

Who influenced your visual style?
I loved Divine and her wild fashion and just always loved sparkle and glitz and glamour.

What are your plans for the future?
I really wanna continue touring and seeing new parts of the world and seeing different cultures. It only adds facets to the diamond that you are. Like any great artist will tell you, they travel to get inspired – by music, art, architecture. For me, there is a whole different architecture of the drag scene everywhere you go. Japan has the Kabuki theatre and that is a fresh perspective that isn’t like London drag for example. There is the Southern United States that is so heavily pageant that it’s magical the way they do their makeup and their hair and everything is so polished – and then it is great to see the grittiness of something else.

What would you say your drag style was?
I would say that my style has pageant influences, and female illusionist but a lot of camp and fun visual gags but always changing and developing something new. A lot of the time on the show you had only an hour and a half to get in drag and it was not always the right thing to start taking a risk because if you fucked it up you’d have to take the whole fucking lot off and start again and you wouldn’t have enough time for that. Then they would say, ‘You are not showing versatility’ and then you’d have to try and take a risk but when you bring what you bring and you have a certain style you stick to it. Like Lady Bunny likes a baby doll dress and Ru Paul likes a dress with an S pattern and ruffles and waves.

Were you restricted with what you could take then?
Absolutely! You could bring five boxes but they all had to be under 50lbs. I now know they didn’t weigh anything, so I could have brought a lot more. For someone like me from the East Coast, you are gonna have shoes in one, makeup in another and hair in the third cos you don’t want it to get crushed and then that leaves you with two suitcases – all your drag, all your outfits, plus the 13 different things, and the mini challenges and you have to figure out how to pack it all tiny and light. If you are somebody who is a size 2 and then you have someone who is a size 22 you can fit probably three dresses in there. Adore was very good at throwing stuff together. She didn’t take a lot of stuff with her but knew how to put a look together.

You’re Pandora Boxx’s drag mother. How long have you known her for?
I have known her like 22-23 years. I met her through another friend of ours. He was an older gay guy and he would always bring out these young boys, and she was one of them. Haha…when he was introducing me, she was really confused as to why they were calling me, this boy who kinda looks like a Lesbian, the name of a theme park. Then when she saw me in drag, she was like, ‘Ohhh, now I get it.’ So she was inspired and told me she wanted to do it too. Even though I was her drag mother, we helped each other out and we would make headsets out of glitter and old pizza boxes, and VCR tape and bead bras together.

How did you feel when she went on drag race? Did you think she was presented in the right way?
Oh absolutely! I definitely saw how quiet she was, because she is a quiet person – but once you get her going she is a lot of fun.  But she lets other people take that spotlight of getting crazy and be like, ‘You know what? Go ahead and make a fool out of yourself, I am gonna sit back here.’ I guess her problem was she didn’t have the aesthetic the judges would have liked and she was like, ‘Well, this is what I brough and guess what? You are gonna hate my look tomorrow too. But it’s all the stuff I brought. If you hate my clothes now, you’re gonna hate my clothes tomorrow.’ You know what honey, it’s never gonna be your cup of tea and fuck ’em if they don’t like ’em and fuck em twice if they do.

Darienne Lake will be appearing at RuPaul’s Drag convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center 16-17 May.

Website: http://dariennelake.com/
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