For the first time in Drag Race herstory, the library has officially been opened by Mother Michelle. And after reading each other for filth, the remaining seven shady ladies were thrown into a makeover challenge with each queen inducting a real-life librarian into their own drag family. It’s not an easy ask by any means—and that’s a lesson Melbourne’s Brenda Bressed learnt the hard way before being asked to sashay away.
In conversation with Not Safe For Queers, Brenda Bressed discusses her performance during this week’s challenge, her gratitude towards her makeover partner, and her strategy for trying to out-lip sync Max Drag Queen.
The reading challenge is one of the very few challenges on Drag Race that feels absolutely integral to the show’s structure. As such, it’s one that the queens start preparing for as soon as they step into the workroom.
“Oh, I was prepared. I was writing reads for those girls from the moment that I met them,” Brenda Bressed tells Not Safe For Queers. And though she may not seem like the shadiest lady in the room, she assures us that she does, in fact, love a good read.
“I like to have fun. I like to poke fun here and there. But I always say you don’t have to be an awful person when you’ve got talent. Y’know, there’s those people who feel the need to rely on being—for lack of a better word—a c*nt. I think those people have to rely on that because they’ve got nothing else going for them,” she laughs.
Ultimately, it was Vybe who secured the mini challenge win, giving her the power to allocate each queen a makeover challenge partner. “I was expecting her to be really strategic with the pairings,” Brenda admits. “But look, I knew the costume I had for the makeover challenge, and I knew that I could make it smaller, but I couldn’t necessarily make it larger. So, in between takes, I whispered to her, ‘please be kind to me,’ and she was. She was kind. She was kind to everyone.”
This kindness landed Brenda with makeover partner Hannah. “Look, I don’t consider myself a makeup artist on a good day. And doing it on someone else? It’s tricky. But Hannah made the whole experience enjoyable. She was such a darling. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner,” she says.
However, even though Brenda’s makeover was arguably one of the best, the judges were not in agreeance, maintaining that the duo’s family resemblance was weak. “It’s just one of those challenges where you really don’t know which way it’s going to go,” she expresses. “Sometimes they say in their critiques that they really love the family resemblance. Sometimes they say you look too similar. And so, from what I could gather is that they want you to look really similar, but not identical.”
“So, we had the exact same silhouette; one of us was black and white, one of us was pink and white; we both had a beehive wig with a scarf around the neck; we both had glasses; we both had the bag—but we were different enough that it was still two different people who went together perfectly.”
“But that’s the thing. It’s the nature of the show. You just don’t know which way it’s going to go,” she says.
After deliberations, Michelle Visage and Rhys Nicholson—together with this week’s special guest judges Spankie Jackzon and Peach PRC—decided that Brenda Bressed and Max Drag Queen were the bottom two queens of the week.
For Brenda, the absolute worst-case scenario was unfolding before her. “From the moment we got to drag race and I saw that Max was in our cast, I thought that if I were to go up against anyone in a lip sync, I don’t want it to be Max. And there I found myself in the bottom two with max,” she laughs.
“So, my thought process was that I’m never going to be able to out-perform her in the way that she performs. I’m never going to be able to out-dance Max. I’m never going to be able to out-trick her, out-split her. So, I was like, I need to do the lip sync my way. I need to do it in a way that she can’t do.
“But ultimately, just before we lip synced, I said to Max, let’s just give them a good show. Let’s just have fun. And I think we did that, and I had a great time. We finished the lip sync and I was just filled with such euphoria, because I knew that I’d given a good performance.”
Episodes of Drag Race Down Under Season 4 stream each Friday—only on Stan.