Exclusive Interview - Stephanie Prince
I'm going start the interview with saying that I’m gutted, I’m so upset that you have been eliminated! You were one of my favourites so when your name came through…
One of your favourites?!
I mean, yeah okay my favourite. I'm really upset that you're gone, I thought you brought such a good energy to the show and yes I agree slightly with your performance being critiqued as one note but it was nothing that deserved to put you in the bottom.
Exactly, like at least I'm at a hundred percent, that's the thing, the challenge was to steal peoples scenes and that's what I did, you know, I stole people's scenes and I don't think it was deserving to be in the bottom two.
“As a gay person and an immigrant, we should just share love towards people, stop hating! I don’t have any solutions to stop racism but I do have something to cover it, even if you're a fan of Drag Race, stop commenting hate about a person and just share love! “
I don't think you should have been there for sure. My first question to you though is how and when did you discover that you wanted to do drag?
Oh god, well I was living in the Philippines and I was always surrounded by ladyboys, we lived in a town where I had so many neighbours that were flamboyant, gay or old lady boys and as a kid I was always in denial with internalized homophobia, saying I don't want to be like them! I don't want to be around them, but they always told me, you're going to be one of us. When I moved from the Philippines to Canada I found out about Drag Race and I was like my god, I was very fascinated by it. At the time I actually was working in a retail clothing store and this guy approached me, he said, you have a face of a woman, I'm like thanks, I actually do want to do Drag, so he took me to my first gay bar on a Friday night and then after that, I had to find out how drag works. They told me it's just show up on a Saturday, it's an open stage, go ahead, so the week after that I did.
Nice and that was it, history was made.
That was it, Stephanie Prince was born. The thing is, I walked into that drag room and I didn’t even know what my brand name was. I walked in there and one of the hosts asked me what's your drag name? I'm like…Stephanie, let's do that.
I was always teased as a kid and called stephanie because like boy name is Stefan, so my friends and family always called me Stephanie, every time I did something too gay for them and I guess that stuck in my heart or my brain you know.
You took ownership of the name Stephanie, from being a negative too a positive. Jumping to Canada’s Drag Race and this week's episode, when you found out it was an acting challenge, what were your first thoughts?
I was very excited because I thought I was going to do a good job. Call me delusional if you like but I still feel like I did great. I was very excited by the challenge because I feel on my audition tape I was a good actress.
If you could have picked another role what would one would you have picked?
I would have stuck with my first choice, which is nara-hater. Honestly I don't know what would have happened still because that character had so many lines and I feel if I had picked that character I would have focussed on the lines instead of the characterization. I was still proud of what I did nonetheless. I'm always going to say this I was robbed.
I’m with you on that! I'm gonna jump back to episode 2 where you were quite open and honest and spoke about the racism that you experienced when you moved to Canada. What do you feel could be done to combat that?
You know unless we put microchips on people and wire their brain a little bit I feel there's nothing really that we can do. There's always people or that one person in a room and unfortunately there's a lot of them. You know one in five people in a room will be racist. As a gay person and an immigrant, we should just share love towards people, stop hating! I don’t have any solutions to stop racism but I do have something to cover it, even if you're a fan of Drag Race, stop commenting hate about a person and just share love!
What would your advice be to someone moving to Canada (or anywhere in the world) who may potentially face the same racism as you did?
Again, if there’s five people in the room, one person will always hate you, find that other four people that are going be your family, especially if move somewhere alone, wherever you move, find those four people because that will be your family for the rest of your life and they will love you eternally, they will support you, they will judge you yes, but they're only doing it because they want what's good for you.
Next week is Snatch Game, who would you have done?
Okay I have three characters, my initial character is going to be Cardi B, then I was going to do Patti LaBelle and have you seen Love is Blind on Netflix? Theres a character named Jessica, she is very white girl drunk and always has a wine bottle with, so I was gonna do her.
I would do great on Snatch Game actually, but you know unfortunately that didn’t happen.
Well there we go, future All-Stars Snatch Game ready.
Are you convincing the producers to call me?
I’ll put in a message personally! What do you hope the future holds for you?
I haven't thought about it that well, I do want to perform, I always want to do a good show and to produce them so that it’s one of the best drag shows that anyone has seen! My initial plan is to take my house of friends on a tour with me. They are I feel, even better than me to be honest. Maybe release some music, but not drag music, I love to rap.
Shout out time – Who would you like to give a shout-out to and why?
I would love to give a shout out to the people who helped me during the process of Drag Race. The ones that got me on there, my Drag-Mom Misty Meadows and Drag-Sister Abeiya Miraj for all the hair, she’s amazing, my ride or die and BW for some of my wigs also. My best friend Brennan and my boyfriend Joey, who is so hot (he was actually on a season of So You Think You Can Dance and this is the gag, he got eliminated on the third episode)! Thank you, thank you to everybody, I love you!
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Photography - Courtesy of World of Wonder
Note: Some of this interview has been edited from the original transcript to help with readability.