Katya Interview: RuPaul’s Drag Race, Trixie Mattel And Podcast Who’s The A**hole

“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m cleaning a men’s wig.”

This feels as fitting a way as any to begin a conversation with Katya Zamolodchikova (your dad just calls her Katya), the drag world’s queen of all things chaotic.

Katya first captured the world’s attention 10 years ago, as one of the break-out stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s seventh season, quickly becoming a popular fan-favourite and returning a year later for the second All Stars season (still considered by many to be the pinnacle of the franchise) a year after being crowned her season’s Miss Congeniality.

A decade on, she’s still considered one of the show’s most popular queens, particularly among non-winners – a title she’s more than happy to retain.

“I’m not a winner – and I mean that not in a pejorative, insult-y way,” she tells HuffPost UK. “I’m not competitive. I found that out the first day I was on the show.”

Katya recalls: “I guess before I went to season seven, I was kind of like, ‘I could win’. And then I got there and I was like, ‘….nope’.”

“But then, I don’t want to!” she continues, pointing out: “When you win, people are like, ’you shouldn’t have won’. And when you lose, they say you should have won. So it’s like, I’ll take that!”

Having not ever picked up a Drag Race crown, she claims, she’s been spared the “the whole combing through your career with a fine-tooth comb” that fans do in order to try and prove, “’see – she didn’t deserve to win here!” or “she should have gone home…”.

“Whatever,” she quips, before adding a playful: “The most important thing is love.”

The Drag Race fandom is something that Katya acknowledges can be a mixed bag, and one which everyone who passes through the show will invariably have a different experience with.

“It’s tough, because real life and online are two very, very different interactions, and two different conceptions of people,” she explains.

“The internet version is a small, nebulous population of people who I don’t know. But in real life – that’s the people coming to the shows, the people who talk to me after the shows, the people who talk to me in the street – those people, 99% of the time, are incredible.

“Online… I don’t know those people. I appreciate them… I think? I don’t know. And also with bots and stuff, who the fuck knows these days?”

For Katya in particular, many of the fans she’s accrued over the last decade know her as well for her work outside of Drag Race as they do her stints on season seven and All Stars.

Much of this has seen her collaborating with her season seven sister turned right-hand woman Trixie Mattel, most notably the web series UNHhhh, the Netflix recap show I Like To Watch and, more recently, their gloriously-titled podcast The Bald And The Beautiful.

Both Katya and Trixie have made no secret of the fact that their more devoted and zealous fans can be a little unfiltered when meeting them in public, but Katya insists that their oversharing is mostly not an issue for her.

“I don’t care! We don’t have that much time! We could all be dead tomorrow! Share it! You know?” she enthuses. “Just – if it’s a meet and greet, don’t overstep, because we’ve got a line.”

Last summer, Katya and Trixie marked 10 years since they went off to film season seven by rewatching the whole thing, and devoting one episode of their podcast to each instalment.

For Katya, this marked the first time she’d watched it all back since she took part, and she found she had a lot of grace for her younger self.

“The other day, I was talking to somebody who was going to go on Drag Race, or somebody had just been on Drag Race, or whatever, and somebody was asking for advice,” she recalls. “It’s really, really simple. You just go and try to be as funny as you can. And so, rewatching it, I was like, ‘oh, I could have been funnier there’.

“But, like, I don’t care about the bad drag, because we were all poor! And I still have bad drag! Who cares? I’m not dressed by Valentino! I don’t have that much money – although I am extremely rich – but you know, it’s cringe-y, but also it’s fun.”

“And here’s the thing,” she adds. “If people are fans of you and they love you, you can’t be too hard on yourself – because then you’re insulting them!”

In fact, she had more notes for her looks out of drag than for anything she wore on the runway.

“The clothing is a huge head scratcher,” she admits. “I don’t know whose clothes those were. I don’t know what that art teacher jacket was, or how that happened. I have actually been kind of goth my entire life, to wear that jacket is so strange.

“Nowadays, the girls go in with entire boy costume selections. That’s unthinkable to me. I didn’t care! And yet, these young kids are doing it all day and going into the interview room looking like a Balenciaga fashion model, and they’re out on the runway looking like Victoria’s Secret.”

“Damn, good on you,” she concludes. “’Cause I’m a goblin!”

Since Drag Race, Katya’s fanbase has steadily continued to grow thanks to her distinct take on the artform of drag, her irreverent sense of humour and her frankness and candour around issues like sex, mental health and addiction.

Her latest venture allows her to lean into all of these skills, flying solo as the host of the Grindr podcast Who’s The Asshole?. (“She let me out of the house!” Katya jokes of not working with Trixie on the interview series. “It was a really pivotal moment in our career and friendship and our sub-dom relationship when she unshackled me from my bed and allowed me to work solo. Of course, I still have to give her all the money…”).

The podcast sees Katya chatting to guests as varied as fashion icon Jeremy Scott, electroclash pioneer Peaches, viral comedian Megan Stalter and Drag Race’s “Queen of Queens” herself, Jinkx Monsoon, about “sex, social mores, taboos and what that means in the digital marketplace for sex and love”.

“I love talking to people, and it’s fascinating stuff!” she beams. “It’s not like hauling bricks down a quarry. Which was my previous job…”

Now onto her third season of Who’s The Asshole?, Katya credits her success as a host to the fact that she knows “how to listen” – and she’s been part of enough interviews over the years, as both a presenter and guest, to know what not to do.

“I’ve noticed – without naming any names – in the current entertainment landscape, there are quite a few people who are hosts who perhaps should… try something else,” Katya says. “Their skillset is just not in that arena.”

“When you’re a host, you’ve got to listen to somebody. And you have to listen to the whole sentence. When you’re talking to someone, and you can see behind their eyes that you’re just waiting for you to finish whatever the fuck you’re saying so they can chime in with their – perhaps non-sequitir – comment, it’s like…” she trails off, groaning.

“That didn’t happen on the Grindr podcast!” she quickly adds. “But just in general – that is just… ugh. It’s hard, sometimes. Sometimes it can feel like you’re the dentist and you’ve got to pull a bunch of teeth, with no laughing gas.”

Katya recalls: “There’ve been very few times [outside of Who’s The Asshole?] when that’s happened, and it’s just a bummer, you know? Because when you’re creating something in the moment, or you’re filming something, it’s like, ‘well we’re not going to use this because who would ever want to watch or listen to this?’.”

Fortunately, Grindr has selected a line-up of guests for Who’s The Asshole? which Katya describes as “consistently, at the very least, nice, mostly wonderful and often incredible”.

As well as an audio podcast, Who’s The Asshole? is also available to watch as a video series on YouTube, with Katya fronting each episode out of drag – surely an endorsement of her skills as a host that Grindr cared more about having her present than have anyone else in drag.

“We’ll go with that as the official word,” she jokes. “But there’s not enough aircon in the world for me to get through a whole day [of filming] in drag.

“My interview skills would be severely compromised if I had to spend 30 to 40% of my brain power worrying about, ‘do I look like crap?’, ‘am I sweating?’, ‘oh my god, I’m worried about my hair…’.”

This way, she says, she “can just show in my little wiglet, put a little powder on and hit it”.

It should be noted that this is the moment, Katya throws on the wig she’s been cleaning since the start of our interview (“I won’t take up all your time with the wig because we’ve got business to do,” she says, modelling. “But this is my Targaryen fantasy”.)

“As fierce as drag is, let me tell you, it feels like a palliative care situation,” she continues, before correcting herself: “No, no, no. Sorry. That would have morphine. Drag feels like you’re in a Saw movie. Like you’re in a Saw trap.

“And if you want to do eight hours of that, good luck. But they’d have to pay me about $3.5 million a minute. No, I’m just kidding…”

Katya’s break-out moment on Drag Race season seven came not just at a turning point for the reality show, but the artform of drag more generally.

While RuPaul famously once declared that drag could “never be mainstream”, it came impressively close in the 2010s. Just a couple of years after season seven, queens were popping up on major red carpets like the VMAs, Grammys and Met Gala.

Drag Race alum were becoming celebrities in their own right, landing roles on primetime shows and popping up on Broadway. Before long, Ru came out with another quote: “Earlier this year I was quoted saying I’d rather have an enema than an Emmy. But thanks to the Television Academy, I can have both!”

Unfortunately, the pendulum soon began swinging in the opposite direction, and in the 2020s, a conservative backlash became steadily louder, with queerphobic rhetoric and legisalation, much of it aimed at drag queens, becoming infuriatingly commonplace.

“Without getting too dark,” Katya says. “Listen, I don’t know any drag queens on that list.” She pauses. “The Epstein list,” she clarifies. “Not Craigslist. Or Angie’s List.

“I don’t think there’s a single [drag queen] that’s gone to that island. And yet, just months and years ago, we were the ones who were considered to be groomers? Give me a break!”

“Look at the person pointing the finger and shouting, because they need to look in the mirror,” she continues. “And voilà. That’s what happened.”

As for the fear felt by many queer people around the world in the current political climate, Katya laments that this is more than justified.

“Be very afraid!” she warns. “Be afraid – and also get engaged, because it’s becoming very clear that the people in power, not just here [in the United States] but around the world, are so greedy, so psychotic, and so selfish that they are going to stop at nothing to make this bizarre world the way that they want it.

“We’re all going to suffer, and we are suffering. Gay, straight, whatever…”

“Jesus Christ,” she sighs. “I don’t have any advice.”

Besides? “Watch Democracy Now?” And? “Wear a funky hat?”

Katya is the host of the Grindr podcast Who’s The Asshole?, which is now back for its fourth season.