Here’s Why The Cast Of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race Live Untucked’ Says The New Series Is ‘A Lot Less Pressure’

The stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race Live Untucked say that the new show is unlike anything that they, and the Drag Race fandom, have witnessed.

The show goes behind the scenes of the cast of the RuPaul’s Drag Race Live! show in Vegas.

“It’s so much nicer than doing a competition series,” Season 14 alum, Bosco, told Blavity’s Shadow and Act during an interview before the premiere. “This is more of us hanging out and at work in our element. We’re doing what we know we’re good at. What we have spent years practicing and working towards, so it’s such a much chiller and more fun and playful environment to be a part of.”

“It’s a lot of fun because you don’t have the pressure of competition, and especially if filming this show, you’ve arrived,” Season 5 and All Stars 2’s Coco Montrese added. “I mean if you made it through post-Drag Race Live and you’re able to do that every single night, you have arrived, so it’s a lot less pressure. We’ve already established our characters or who we are for our audience.”

While the series’ name resembles the iconic aftershow to the main RuPaul’s Drag Race series, Vegas show performers like Season 8 and All Stars 5‘s Derrick Barry say this is nothing like it.

“This is almost completely untucked,” said Barry. “Like, you’re not only getting to see us in that kind of living room, couch-setting type of place, but you get to follow us outside of the show as well, and we play games and do things that we wouldn’t normally do after the show or before the show. And so I think it takes you on a journey of a day in the life, in which you get to see us out of drag, in drag, on stage, offstage, backstage. It’s an all-access pass to our life instead of just after the show.”

“It’s very different, you know,” RuPaul’s Drag Race UK Season 2 winner Lawrence Chaney said. “On the normal RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars show, you see a lot of people that are upset or nervous or angry because they’ve landed at the bottom of that competition element. That’s very much at the forefront, where it’s like, ‘Well, girls, who do we think the best is, and who RuPaul does not like?’ With this, it’s about, ‘Oh, what was the crowd like tonight?’ It’s a much more real look at being an artist, being a performer, and how you get through a show. From doing the show like putting on makeup for the show, wardrobe malfunctions and falling on stage. There’s lots that’s explored and seen. Then, the ability that we have as performers to let go of it, laugh about it, talk about it if it upsets us, but you’re able to see how we as performers also decompress after a show.”

Overall, the cast admits that this is a series centered around the work that they’ve put in to get to this point and entertain the masses in Las Vegas.

“They will get to see our work ethic,“ Season 4, All Stars 1, All Stars 4 contestant Latrice Royale said. “They’ll get to see what goes into what we do like the heart, the soul, the blood, sweat, tears, and all of the stress and anxiety that we go through, learning new parts. You’re gonna see my journey transitioning from being on cast to hosting. There’s a lot of things, and this is a great way to see it without it seeming like it’s forced. This is just a documentation of how it goes on the daily.”

Season 7 and All Stars 3‘s Kennedy Davenport added, “I love the camaraderie of the queens, of my sisters and us coming together to make good television, even though that’s the goal on both shows, but this particular part is more down-home, so much more relatable and funny. I mean what’s life without laughter? This allows us to just let our hair down and be funny and make some good TV.”

RuPaul’s Drag Race Live Untucked premieres new episodes weekly on WOW Presents Plus.