‘A dog would get treated better than a drag queen in Hollywood’: Alaska on prejudice and leading Oh, Mary!

Alaska may be starring in the most subversive comedy in American theater today, but she carries herself with the poise of a 40s movie star. On a brisk September afternoon, the actor, comedian and RuPaul’s Drag Race alumnus is in a small rehearsal room in New York’s midtown, sipping hot tea from a flask while perched on a hard-shell travel case. She sits bolt upright, as if she has spent her life balancing books on her head.

It has been a madcap time for the actor as she prepares to play Mary Todd Lincoln in a new touring production of Cole Escola’s Tony award-winning comedy Oh, Mary!. She is amid a few weeks of rehearsals in the city before the show’s four-month sprint across the US. When I ask how she is handling the upheaval from her Los Angeles home, she smiles indulgently. “I mean, I would go to the planet Remulak for this show,” she says, referencing the home planet of the Coneheads. “I didn’t even think about it. I was just like, ‘Let’s make this happen.’”

Alaska (AKA Alaska Thunderfuck 5000, born Justin Honard) is on the brink of her biggest career moment yet and is determined to make every moment of it count. Since competing in season five of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2013, the self-described “extraterrestrial phenomenon from the planet Glamtr0n” has released five electro-pop albums with titles like Anus and Vagina, taken to the high seas for drag-themed cruises and co-written and performed in the off-Broadway hit Drag: The Musical, produced by Liza Minnelli. Her live performances showcase the art of drag at its high-concept creative peak; a recent performance of Taylor Swift’s The Fate of Ophelia was a delightfully dizzying hurricane of hairstyles, props, frills and feathers, with three costume changes in as many minutes.

With Oh, Mary!, Alaska is stepping away from nightlife stages and into the shoes of a character already played by actors including Maya Rudolph, Jane Krakowski and Jinkx Monsoon as well as Escola. A London production opened in 2025, while a live-recorded special of the show will air on HBO next year. The character of Mary Todd Lincoln, in Escola and director Sam Pinkleton’s vision, is stifled by her duties, drinks to escape the unbearable company of her (closeted) husband, and longs to return to the life as a cabaret star that she gave up to be first lady.

Director Pinkleton first encountered Alaska over a decade ago when she played Nomi Malone in a Showgirls tribute show at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre. “It was electric,” he tells me. “I was like, ‘This person is a star; you can’t take your eyes off her.’”

Pinkleton cast Alaska in a 2021 Los Angeles production of Head Over Heels, which reimagined the Broadway musical as a queer rave. “I couldn’t believe how much she cared and how great she was technically,” he says. “I have since worked with a lot of drag queens, and I’ve had exclusively great experiences because they are really hard workers. You know, they make everything happen on their own.”

After an initial Zoom workshop with Pinkleton and Escola this March, Alaska was offered the role of Mary this summer. She was particularly struck by the purity of the character’s ambition, even as she resorts to increasingly bizarre tactics to get back on the cabaret stage where she belongs. “This isn’t a comedy show to me,” Alaska says. “This is deathly serious. It’s very real, and I think that’s why so many people can step into the role and make it seem like it’s written for them.”

“I feel like I can make sense of this role,” she adds. “I can’t name any other role where I feel like I make sense. I mean, being a weird drag queen person, queer-bodied person existing in society … that’s exactly what I felt like when I grew up.”

Raised in Erie, Pennsylvania, she was a shy and watchful kid. “I wish that I had the confidence to be like, ‘You know what? I am something and I do deserve more than like being scared to go out of my fucking room,’” she says. “It wasn’t until many years later, when I discovered theater and drag, that I was able to find that in myself. But it is a feeling of like, ‘Fuck, I can’t be.’”

She was introduced to the world of performance while on school trips: she caught a touring production of The Phantom of the Opera while in Canada, and saw a version of Cats at SeaWorld. (“Maybe they should do Oh, Mary! on water skis in Florida,” she muses.) She was especially drawn to the over-the-top femininity of film characters like Jessica Rabbit and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. “Not real people”, she notes.

As a theater major at the University of Pittsburgh, she starred in a 1922 Czech expressionist drama called The Insect Play (she played a murderous wasp) as well as in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Importantly, the program taught every aspect of mounting a production, including directing, playwriting, set design and costume – crucial skills for a drag superstar in the making.

After a few years of gigging around LA, Alaska won a slot on RuPaul’s Drag Race season five. For many fans, it’s still the best season, with a cast that also included Jinkx Monsoon (now a Broadway star in her own right) as well as much-loved comedy queens Detox and Alyssa Edwards. Alaska was the rare queen that could do it all; she finished as runner-up and after the season aired in 2013, she found herself as one of the most famous drag queens in America. “It was being shot out of a fucking cannon. I was in my late 20s, but still mentally I was still a child.”

Alaska and her then-partner Sharon Needles (who had won season four of Drag Race) went from being broke and scraping together money for a 12-pack of beer to being the most famous drag queen couple in America. “Our lives changed a lot really fast, and we made every single mistake that you can make,” she says. “There was no gameplan. There was no roadmap. We suddenly had money and we never had a fucking penny before. It was do every drug, drink every thing.”

After reading a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, who she says “does a really good job of talking about meditation and consciousness in a way that a dumb American can understand”, Alaska became sober for two and a half years. These days, she has a more moderate relationship with alcohol, which has set her up to be in fighting shape for Oh, Mary! “The rehearsal has been really intense,” she says. “It’s like doing cardio every day. Which is great, because I hate cardio.”

Despite its financial successes in New York (Oh, Mary! was the first show of the 2024-25 season to recoup its costs), the show is perhaps not the most natural choice to tour a politically divided country, with dates in smaller cities including Hartford, Connecticut, and Saint Paul, as well as Los Angeles and Boston. “I think it’s pretty great,” Alaska says. “It’s going to be interesting because there are going to be people seeing the show who don’t go see Broadway shows all the time. I’m excited to shock people.

“I mean, it would even be important even if we didn’t have a piece of shit in the Oval Office,” she says. “But I think it’s always worth being who we are – loudly, fiercely and hilariously. That’s always a good thing.”

The pipeline from drag superstar to grande dame of theatre hasn’t always been so well established, and Alaska credits Jinkx Monsoon’s arc from Drag Race to Broadway as an inspiration. “She’s slammed open so many doors for so many people,” Alaska says. “And she continues to do so. I’m glad to walk right through, honey.”

Does she face stereotypes because of her background in drag? “It’s definitely better now. I mean, I’ve been doing drag for almost 20 years. On a Hollywood set, a dog would get better treatment than a drag queen. And that’s not even an exaggeration. That’s hard, and that shit still exists and still happens.”

I’m curious if Drag Race feels far away to Alaska now. It’s been 10 years since she was crowned the winner of All Stars season two. “Yes and no”, she says. “My job as a podcaster is talking about Drag Race. I still work with all the girls from Drag Race all the time. Yes, it’s in the past, but still it’s very much a part of my life. I wish I was more in that universe, but they won’t fucking invite me. So if they read this, maybe they could call me. I would love to have been in Stop! That! Train!” So RuPaul and the film’s producers never got in touch? “No”, she says crisply. That’s a shame. “I agree.”

That comedy film seems like small potatoes when compared to the plans Alaska is hatching. After Oh, Mary! wraps, she will embark on her 50-date, 50-state Revolution Tour this March, taking in the length and breadth of the country from Fayetteville to Fargo. Even an A-list pop star would balk at such an ambitious schedule. “I know,” she smiles. “This is just something that my fiance and I have wanted to do for a while. There’s a lot of states that we just haven’t been to, let alone gotten to do drag in.

“There are gay people everywhere, and they don’t often get to go out to a drag show,” she says, as if casting her mind back to the Catwoman-obsessed kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania. But isn’t it a logistical nightmare? Alaska throws her head back and laughs.

“Well”, she says, “nobody has told me no!”

• Alaska is in the touring production of Oh, Mary! until 17 January