The ruveal was legendary, but for all the wrong reasons.
Over the past years, it feels like we’ve had hundreds of seasons of Drag Race to watch — but who’s complaining, right? — so it might feel like ancient history to ask you to cast your minds back to the season 10 finale, even though it only aired two years ago.
Much like season 9 before it, and the seasons since then, the top four had to lip-sync for the crown in a battle royale. And in the first lip-sync of the evening, assassin Kameron Michaels was up against fierce performer Asia O’Hara.
The performance went down in HERstory, but for all the wrong reasons. Attempting to channel Sasha Velour’s iconic rose reveals, Asia had some butterflies in her costume, and was ready to let them fly at key points of the song. However, the lifeless insects failed to take off, and all you need to do is look at Monique Heart’s face during that lip-sync to know how well it down.
Speaking on Entertainment Weekly’s BINGE podcast, season 10 stars Eureka O’Hara and Monét X Change spoke about planned ruveals that could’ve been legendary, and Eureka also spoke about Aquaria’s reaction to Asia’s performance.
“The cutest thing was how emotional it made Aquaria, randomly,” Eureka recalled. “It was so sweet. Me and Aquaria were backstage and, when it happened, luckily there was a chair there, but Aquaria collapsed into a chair with shock.”
“It was weird because me and Aquaria were very shook, and we had to go out right after. We were shaking and freaked out.”
Eureka also revealed she originally had some smoke bombs planned for her lip-sync against Aquaria, and this is why she wore a mirrored leotard. “I had neon smoke bombs that were supposed to go off,” she explained. “The whole idea behind it was smoke and mirrors.”
However, she ended up scrapping the idea, because after a practice session “there was so much smoke I was like, bitch, ‘I will fill up that whole auditorium and get disqualified!'”
Speaking about reveals, Monét worried that everyone in the finales were now trying to replicate Sasha’s success, but that the attempts miss what Sasha did, as hers “made sense with the story.”
She added: “For Asia to pull out butterflies for Janet Jackson’s Nasty, it made no sense! If you did something with blood or gore, that makes sense, but there was no reason…
“There’s a shot of all four of them right before they know who’s lip-syncing against who, and Asia’s in these huge square t-ts, Kameron is in a typical every bar queen reveal getup, Eureka looks like [they’re] hiding whatever under [their] purple thing, and Aquaria’s in a half-eaten Chipotle burrito… it was so obvious. So in that regard, we all knew something was coming!”
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