RuPaul’s Drag Race Winner Bianca del Rio
An exclusive interview with recently crowned winner of RuPaul's Drag Race
Photo by Mathu Andersen
MW: Are you able to shut it off — your sassy, insult persona as Bianca — when you’re not in costume and makeup?
DEL RIO: Yeah, but it’s still the same thought process. It’s not like it’s walk into a room and you’re on. It’s my job, so I do it. And because it’s worked for so many years, and on a weekly and daily basis — at times I’m doing five nights a week. But I don’t lose myself in it, and it’s not necessarily who I am. It’s just what they’re paying to see. When I’m with my friends, of course we can read each other and we have snarky comments. Of course. But as myself I don’t walk into a restaurant and hold court and try to take over. Or say, “Don’t you know who I am?” Not my thing. It’s more or less, you do what you do on stage when you’re paid for it. It’s not my show 24/7. Not at all.
MW: Are you recognized often in public, even as a boy?
DEL RIO: Thanks to the show, totally. Eighty percent of the show you’re out of drag. So people get to see you all the time. [Previously] they couldn’t tell till they heard my voice. Because I have one of those rancid voices. [Laughs.] But now it’s definitely because of the show that they can clock me. At airports, bars, drugstore, they clock me.
MW: Any standout experiences getting clocked?
DEL RIO: Just recently at the airport, the TSA agent congratulated me. So that was fun. ‘Cuz you think, “Really?!? It’s 6 o’clock in the morning.” [Laughs.] But she clocked me. She told me she was watching me on the show, which was very sweet.
MW: When you were a kid growing up in Louisiana, did you dream of being a performer when you grew up?
DEL RIO: I was never a big dreamer. I’ve never really sat back and said this is what I want to do. I was the fourth of five kids. I had done sports — karate even. Craziness that people thought I should do. I didn’t like it, I didn’t excel at it. And nothing really clicked until I went into theater. And when I did theater it was definitely my world. I loved performing.
MW: And your parents encouraged it?
DEL RIO: I think my parents in the beginning were kind of like, “Whoa! What’s going on?” But never too negatively. I think they were always concerned, as parents are for their kids, in what the world was going to think of them, or what was to come. By no means was I a victim or hated on, whatever, in my childhood. I wasn’t bullied. I just went to high school. And high school was annoying and people were assholes, but it was high school. By no means do I feel like I was a victim.
MW: Are you the more outgoing, creative one in your family?
DEL RIO: Oh totally. And always have been. And once again, to your family, it can be annoying and you can be crazy, but then when you go into theater and the world, they think, “Oh my god, what talent. You can do so many things.” So it was a good balance for me. It kept me grounded.
MW: Have you always been funny?
DEL RIO: Well, funny is a question you’d have to ask an audience. I’ve always had my points of views, and I’ve always had my opinions. But I mean it’s always been my thought process. I think now in retrospect, yeah, I was probably always a clown growing up. I think it’s always been there.
MW: Was coming out a struggle?
DEL RIO: Not at all. I mean, I was called gay before I was gay. I didn’t even know what that meant. I knew that I was different by just the way people treated me, but I never sat down with my parents, ever, and had a discussion about my sexuality or who I was. None of that. Just as my brother didn’t sit down and tell them he was heterosexual. It just never happened. I just kind of lived my life, but there was never that type of discussion. I never felt that I needed that validation from them.
MW: When did you move to New York?
DEL RIO: I moved to New York nine years ago. I was living in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina happened. I had no sad story like a lot of other people. I didn’t experience destruction or lose my home at all. I was living and working there. I was working at a bar [Oz Nightclub] five days a week for 10 years. And it was just this moment, because of the water level near my home, we weren’t allowed to go back to New Orleans quickly. So I was out and about for about a month and a half, two months maybe. I visited friends in Atlanta, and I visited friends in New York. And I was 30 at the time, and I just felt like, why not make a change? So I made the transition to move to New York. And when we were allowed back, I went home and got my stuff.
MW: How often do you go back to New Orleans?
DEL RIO: Three or four times a year. When you live and work in New York, it’s hard to take off because it’s so goddam expensive here. So I don’t vacation for two and three weeks at a time. I’m not a vacation-type gal. But I do go home for holidays to work in New Orleans. I’m there usually Halloween, Mardi Gras, Southern Decadence.
MW: While in New Orleans you’ve appeared in a few stage productions, including Cabaret and Rent. Do you want to do more theater in the years to come?
DEL RIO: I never rule anything out. And because of Drag Race, there’s so much interest in everything. I’m stretching and doing things that I never imagined. I’m working on a feature film with my friend Matt Kugelman that we’re trying to get made called Hurricane Bianca. And also writing a new one-woman/one-man drag cabaret show that I plan to do in the fall.
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