The queen sits down with ET to dish on season 10 so far, from her beefs with Miz Cracker and The Vixen to the surprises still to come.
If RuPaul doesn’t see the star in you, does that mean you’re not showing Ru your star? Probably. But Aquaria is ready to change that on the second half of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 10.
“I realized I don't always come off the way that I think that I come off,” the queen tells ET of her time on the show. “So, yes, [I’m] misunderstood, but also I'm not giving them a lot of understanding to be working with.”
“I think that a lot of issues that arose at Drag Race [were] more that I was just in the mindset of, do the job,” she says. “Get in, get out. You've gotta hold on hopefully for a long time, so just get the job done, and in doing that, I think that I forgot that I was supposed to make friends, be personable. Not just be a fierce competitor, but be, like, a human that the girls can relate to and y'all can relate to, yeah.”
Aquaria says it took her fellow queens awhile to fully “get” her.
“You know, everybody keeps saying, 'The jokes don't land.' A lot of the times they don't,” she laments. “But, I'll say something funny in the workroom and then an hour later, during lunch break, Asia [O’Hara] will come up to me, when we're not supposed to be talking, [and go] 'Aquaria, I just got the joke. I see what you were trying to say.' Hello, duh! Yeah, whenever the camera's were off, that's when I was at my funniest, for sure.”
Another roadblock for the girls getting to know Aquaria was her insta-feud with Miz Cracker, which Aquaria actually blames on a queen from Drag Race herstory.
“Yeah, I mean, in New York City, we would always get compared to each other and I, to this day, blame Bob the Drag Queen for this,” she reveals. “He posted a picture of us both out of drag and was like, 'These two heifers look alike.'”
“Then, I get to Drag Race [and] I walk into the workroom, you know, everyone's asking about it and after a while, after 50 million questions, you're like, wait! You know what?! I am so mad at this,” she says. “‘This is not acceptable!’ Which is not the case. You get, like, all shook up in your head.”
Aquaria says she had a feeling she and Cracker would come face-to-face in the season 10 workroom, so she fully anticipated having to confront their issues on TV. What she didn’t anticipate was the pressure of having to tackle things so quickly.
“I may say something that might sound dramatic, but my actual feeling-feelings are nowhere near [that], you know?” she shares. “I'm saying all this stuff about this stupid yellow dress [we both wore] that wasn't even a good example of it.”
“When we did get to discuss it, you know, we just, like, nipped it in the bud, took care of it,” she reveals. “[I was like], ‘I got a little too heated about this, but let's just, going forward, I want to see you do well in the competition and go far. I certainly want to go farther than you, but let's just try to do our best us, whether it's by accident or on purpose, or whatever. Let's just turn it out for each other and be the best us we can be.'"
Now, Aquaria is somewhat caught in The Vixen’s crosshairs, after a series of misunderstandings and arguments with, arguably, season 10’s most ready-to-fight queen.
“I love The Vixen so much, quite honestly,” Aquaria admits. “I'm just standing here trying to be a little b***hy … So, in my head, we're cool, but we've never actually spoken about being cool. So, I think that's where a big misunderstanding came into play.”
“I didn't know The Vixen was there to fight,” she adds. “Someone shoulda warned me!”
Still, it’s that not knowing part that Aquaria says she was fully prepared for when she signed up for the show.
“I kinda expected it to be something that you can't expect,” she shares. “Past Drag Race alum that I’ve spoken to, their biggest advice to me was, expect the unexpected and there's no way that you can prepare for this, so I thought I was at least ahead of the curve, knowing that I wasn't prepared.”
“[Season nine’s] Valentina came to New York for a show and she pulled me aside, and she said, 'Aquaria, I know you might be doing something very fun soon and I just want you to know that you need to have fun with it and stay happy,'" she shares. "'You know, you might be a superstar like Miss Vanessa Mateo, but you could be gone in a day, so just have fun with it.'"
“I feel very blessed to be a part of the cast and blessed to be a part of season 10,” Aquaria notes. “‘Cause it really is such a killer season. I can't wait to see what else happens on TV."
RuPaul’s Drag Race airs Thursdays on VH1. For more on the show, check out the video and links below.
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