With only two weeks left before Michelle Visage crowns Down Under’s Next Drag Superstar, the competition is heating up and emotions are running high. This episode, the queens of Season 4 are tasked with a unique acting challenge: a solo audition for the role of Tutu Much in the brand-new soap opera Platy-pussies On Fire. The challenge, with its objectively unclear judging framework, had many of the queens second guessing their performances—including Max Drag Queen, who was ultimately asked to sashay away.
In a rather unfiltered conversation with Not Safe For Queers, Max Drag Queen discusses her dissatisfaction with last week’s decisions, her bitterness towards this week’s challenge, and her confidence in knowing that she was next to go home.
At the top of this week’s episode, the queens return to the workroom after a nail-biting lip sync between Max and Brenda Bressed—and tears are a-flowing as they read Brenda’s mirror message.
“It was emotional. It was really hard,” Max tells Not Safe For Queers. “A lot of people obviously saw Brenda as a frontrunner, so to send a frontrunner home, it felt really weird.”
Adding to the emotions, as the lovely fifth alternate of Down Under Season 4 tells us, is that last week’s episode panned out entirely differently than she’d imagined. “Do I think I should’ve been lip syncing? No. Do I think that Brenda should have been lip syncing? No.”
“My opinions do not reflect the opinions of said host, or audience,” she adds, jokingly. “But I think that the criteria changed for every single person. It felt like an attempt…it just felt like a kick in the guts, really. So, I was not feeling great walking into the workroom this week.”
As a new day dawns on the queens, they’re tasked with overreacting to a b*tch slap from Michelle Visage before being told that, this week, they’ll be competing in an acting challenge. And while some (including Vybe and Freya Armani) are relishing in the opportunity to showcase their acting chops, others (like Lazy Susan, and Nikita Iman) are much more apprehensive of what’s to come.
For Max, she argues that it’s one of the worst challenges the show has put forward since season one. “What a stupid challenge. What a dumb challenge,” she exclaims. “I have a Certificate III in screen acting, I’m a theatre kid, I’ve done many production shows. I wasn’t worried.”
“But—across the board—there was just no correct way to do this challenge because I don’t think that they knew what to judge us on. It was one of those things where they could’ve done whatever they wanted with the judging.”
“So I think, considering the circumstances, I did a good job. I was the only queen to be completely off script. But, ultimately—can I swear?—it was a dumb f*cking challenge, like, what a stupid challenge?”
Following such a controversial challenge, the runway category was Liquid Dreams. And while many of the queens wore pieces not entirely dissimilar to Kim Kardashian’s wet Met Gala look, it was Lazy Susan who (once again) brought the category to life with actual water running down her front.
After the runway, the queens entered untucked and almost everybody was unsure of their positioning—except Max. “We walked into untucked, and Freya and Nikita both turned to me and they both said, ‘Max, you’re in the top this week,’” she says.
“But I knew it was my time to go. Nikita had just come up off a win, and it was my third time in the bottom. So, before the lip sync started, I walked over to Lazy (which I got in trouble for) and I said, ‘I’ll see you in Melbourne.’ Like, I knew it was my time.”
“I was just exhausted. I was tired. And Michelle and I had spoken about how tired and exhausted I was. Grieving is something that is so exhausting, and I think Michelle new that. So, this felt like a kindness, for her to let me go. It felt like the correct way for me to go.”
In the final few moments of the show, Max and Nikita lip sync to Tove Lo’s Talking Body. “Isis loves Tove Lo, so to perform in front of Isis was mental. I was like, I’m doing this for you. I knew it was my time to go, so if I’m going then this is for us. This is our moment,” she says.
Episodes of Drag Race Down Under Season 4 stream each Friday—only on Stan.