Exclusive Interview - That Girl

That Girl! Hello my dear, welcome to Spill the Tea.
Thank you so much for having me!

At the end of last year we saw compete for ‘The Crown’ but before we get to that I want to start this interview with when you discovered you wanted to do drag?
I’d wanted to try out drag for quite a long time, but what really sparked it, or at least kicked me into gear, was when I was studying for my MA in Musical Theatre at Mountview. We had to do a 45 minute solo show called a “Creative Project” and I decided quite early on that I wanted to do drag. While Drag Race was the initial spark that had me wanting to try drag out, what made me want to continue doing it beyond my show was seeing the incredible drag artists out on the scene. It was seeing them perform that really sparked my love for it. There is nothing quite like the live experience of seeing a drag artist performing and I will never forget being at The Apple Tree in Clerkenwell for the first time with big tears in my little gay eyes watching one of Me The Drag Queen’s shows.

How did you choose your drag name?
For the MA show, I obviously needed to come up with a drag name. There were a lot on the list, and I mean a lot, that I came up with and ran by my MA advisor (legend, icon and drag parent whether he likes it or not Dr Joe Parslow) but none of them really fit. I ended up referring to her as That Girl and it just stuck. The show ended up being called “Who’s That Girl?” so it all sort of worked out.

“I don’t do confidence very often so to have that validation from the audience, many of whom were coming every week, and from the judges who were scoring us felt amazing”

Did you have any rejected names and if so, what were they?
There were so many that I actually ended up using them in my debut YA novel that came out in August 2020. (It’s called Boy Queen, it’s about a teenage boy who wants to be a drag queen, available now where books are sold!) So I ended up giving them to the characters in the book. Favourites include: Kaye Bye, Mae Bee and Dawn Raid. But there are loads in there! Seriously...buy the book...please?

How would you describe your drag?
In my Instagram bio I have “Stagey, campy and all sorts of stupid” and I feel like that still applies. I mostly lip sync to pop culture things with pop songs (though I have started singing recently, god help us all!) but I am most likely to make something that is really, really ridiculous and then push it one step further.

One of my favourite numbers that I did in The Crown was for Movies week where my category was Animated and I did Wall-E! WALL-E!! I was pretending to be a little trash robot at Freedom Bar in Soho. (And now I want to change my Instagram Bio to “That Girl – Little trash robot!” Ha!)

Basically if I’m sat in my room cackling and thinking “That is so stupid!” while I am making a number then I am probably going to do it.

You describe yourself on your socials as stagey and campy and all kinds of stupid, with drag being portrayed in the mainstream media usually as ‘supermodel drag’ what makes a campy queen just as good?
I think the thing to remember (and I talk about this a lot in the book) is that there is so much more to drag than drag race. One of my besties Shar Cooterie put it best “All of Drag Race is drag, but not all drag is Drag Race” because not everything fits into that little box, into that formula. All of it is valid and that’s a thing to remember as fans of drag as well as drag performers. While TV may be showing you fierce, skinny, runway ready queens (who I also love), we need to remember that there is SO MUCH MORE out there.

As I said, when I first started doing drag for my MA it stemmed from a love of Drag Race, what kept me doing it was seeing the huge amount of variety there was on the scene, the incredible performers who were really pushing outside of what that Drag Race box had told us drag was. If you go out onto the scene to see a show (hopefully) you will see everything from singing, lip syncing, burlesque, comedy, and beyond. It’s all there for the taking and I would encourage anyone who says they are a fan of drag to soak as much of that variety up as possible. It’s fun!

You recently competed in The Tuckshop’s ‘The Crown’. What made you want to apply?
Well, I was in the original Season 2 of The Crown (the one that got cancelled because of Covid in March 2020) so I originally applied because I wanted to push myself. I wanted to really learn more about myself and about That Girl as a queen. I’d only been doing drag for less than a year at the time, so it would have been a steep learning curve, that’s for sure. Having done it again now, I don’t know if I would have survived that long in the competition!

Applying the second time around was a combination of unfinished business and also I felt more ready this time than before. In the original season I thought I would make it through a few weeks and meet some lovely people along the way (I definitely did meet lovely people, I’m still very close with a lot of the drag artists on that season!) but in the second go around I felt ready to do the damn thing. Which is rare for me, I don’t do confidence that often but apparently was really feeling myself when it came around again.

I knew myself better, knew more about the kind of drag That Girl did and felt more confident in myself as a queen. That isn’t to say I didn’t learn a heck of a lot while doing the competition, I did. You never stop learning and That Girl from Week 1 is SO much different to That Girl in the final.

You made it all the way to the grand-final! How did it feel to do so well in the competition?
It honestly felt incredible. As I said in my previous answer, I don’t do confidence very often so to have that validation from the audience, many of whom were coming every week, and from the judges who were scoring us felt amazing. Everyone in that competition worked so hard, and it was a fierce fight all the way to the end, I felt very lucky to be there.

The cherry on top of all of that was getting to perform every week, make so many different numbers, push myself in terms of what I did for my drag and getting to meet a bunch of incredibly creative, incredibly talented people. I got to see a top class drag show every week for six weeks. That’s pretty cool.

Massive shoutout just now to all of the drag artists in The Crown S2, both the Covid season and the re-do. You’re all bloody sensational, I hope you know that.

What did you love most about competing?
My favourite thing each week was watching what everyone was going to come up with in the given category. That was always the best part because everybody was so creative and came at things from a different point of view. What I love about watching drag is watching someone perform and thinking “I really wish I’d thought of that, that is genius!” and I found myself doing that every week in The Crown.

I will not, however, miss the intense anxiety that came before every bloody performance. I was always a wreck pretty much from the moment I arrived at Freedom until I had done my number. Terrible!

What do you hope to achieve in 2022?
I want to perform more. The end of 2021 was huge for me and for That Girl. From October to the end of the year I was doing drag every single week, whether it was The Crown or the pantomime I was doing straight after that at The Bridge House Theatre. So it’s been amazing and I don’t want that to stop. So if you’re reading this and you have seen what I can do and you like it and you book people? Baby. Reach out, DM, whatever, because I want to go and twirl in places I’ve not twirled in yet!

Shout out time! What one other Queen, King or queer performer deserves a shout out from you?
Gosh there are so many that I follow and am obsessed with the work of, it’s hard to just pick one. Camay Milan I think is an absolute star on the rise and one to really watch out for in the next few years. An incredible dancer and a fierce lip syncer, she’s also absolutely stunning! No choice but to stan!

And Shar Cooterie, who I have already mentioned in this post. She is one of my besties and I have had the pleasure of seeing her grow from where she was in the Covid Cancelled The Crown S2 all the way to second place in NADC at the RVT. An incredible singing voice and a brain like no other. Once again, a star on the rise!