This Drag Race Star is Lazy!

Written by | Entertainment, Screen

She’s a singer, she’s a dancer, she’s a podcaster, she’s a drag queen, and she’s a winner, baby. From the land that gave us the outlandish drag styles of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, hailing from Upwey, a suburb of Melbourne, comes the winner of Drag Race Down Under season 4, Lazy Susan. Lazy Susan is anything but lazy. She’s a consummate entertainer whose hustle has clearly paid off. Her distinct sense of humor and zany drag aesthetic instantly set her apart in the industry. With her colorful childhood beginnings, her drag journey was destined.

I grew up in a house that was very theatrical, very camp. My dad is like the gayest straight man that ever existed. My mom was a big old dag (eccentric) and a massive theatre nerd. And then my sister is an improv comedy sort of gal. So, there was really no chance of not having at least a little bit of a sense of humor coming out of that environment.

This colorful environment paved the way for Lazy Susan to come into her own when realized she might not be like the other boys.

I was lucky enough to go to a very kind of progressive hippie school up in the Sherbrooke Forest. It was like Montessori – that style of school – but the cheap home brand version. So I was out at around 13. There were a lot of gays at my school. We were all quoting Will & Grace mercilessly at each other. I was always like the other boys at my school because we were all massive flaming homosexuals and it was a great place to be out.

Despite her young age, Lazy Susan’s early drag influences come from classic sources.

My first kind of drag exposure was the childhood ones, Some Like It Hot, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Tootsie. But the most significant early drag influence for me was the film Torch Song Trilogy with Harvey Fierstein, which is still to this day my favorite film. That has influenced so much of my outlook and everything that I take into drag. If you haven’t seen that film, seek it out because it’s amazing. Anne Bancroft, Harvey Feirstein, need I say more?

Film in general has always been part of Lazy Susan’s life. From childhood to earning a BFA from film school, she has found her inspiration from cinematic personalities like Pedro Almodóvar, John Waters, and Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness), anyone who, according to her, is a twisted homosexual. These kinds of films have created Lazy Susan’s style. How to describe Lazy Susan’s looks? It’s hard to put down in words.

I like to dress like a woman who has just done a 12-hour shift at like a tall window, like that’s my dream aesthetic. I love uniforms and polyester suits and name tags. There usually has to be some element of dank in the drag.

As a citizen of Australia and the United States, she actually auditioned for Drag Race for both iterations. One of her audition tapes featured her parents. What was the winning factor for her last audition tape that got her cast for Down Under season 4? She simply puts it – “Desperation.”

Watching herself go through her season was eye-opening. What did she learn the most about herself?

Watching the show back, the thing I learned, and the thing that I think every Drag Race girly learns, is what you actually look like. It’s a traumatizing experience. So, I learned just to make my makeup bigger. How about that?

Now with so many iterations of Drag Race, there are a number of winners in the industry. How is Lazy Susan going to use her crown, what kind of legacy does she want to create?

I think the key to a good reign is bloodshed, like the most bloodshed. Going on the show is not about getting everyone to like you, it’s about finding the people that you are in sync with and then taking them off back to your weird little corner of the drag world. I’m eager to just find as many of the people that are into the sort of things that I’m into and then make content and ideas and things for them. That’s the thing about having so many winners now, not all of them need to be everything to every person. We now have a winner for every different type of queer out there. I hope to find sweaty, dank homosexuals to entertain.

Lazy Susan is the first queen to be crowned by Michelle Visage, who took the reigns over from RuPaul this season. For Lazy Susan, Visage’s presence wasn’t just about hosting a show, it was about adding that mother energy to the show. The two also bonded over the loss of their mothers, adding a bit of glitter to grief.

She’s incredible. It’s amazing watching the season back and the meticulous care that she has for the contestants. She’s adaptive, she didn’t just do a one-size-fits-all all. She got to know our personalities and started to know how to receive us and what sort of advice and ideas to give to us. Like I think the way that both me and Max (another season 4 contestant) had conversations about the passing of our mothers was very different because Max and I have different feelings. I’m a real staunch atheist. When people say, “I think your mom’s looking down on you from heaven.” I’m like, “No, she’s not. She’s in a box in my sister’s living room.” Michelle even adapted that kind of conversation with me when I was in that sit down with her in the final episode, we were talking about the moms. “Yeah, my mom died,” and she says, “How about two mothers dying?” because obviously Michelle has lost both her biological and adoptive mother. That is specific, that is her being irreverent with a girl who talks in that kind of way and then offering a really different kind of softer care to someone who’s in a much more fragile state and has more of a feeling about God and heaven and those sorts of things. I really appreciated that in her.

Torch Song Trilogy was not just an early inspirational film for Lazy Susan but also was a source of comfort in working through her grief of losing her mother.

Going back to Torch Song Trilogy, there’s this great line in that film that definitely provided me a lot of solace, it is when Anne Bancroft talks about losing her husband and she says, “Uh, grief is like wearing a new pair of glasses. At first, it’s all you can think about, and it feels like it’s changed your entire life. And it’s not that it ever goes away, it’s just that you get used to it and it becomes part of your everyday life.” That’s how I think about grief. I feel it and live through it. You can’t try and obfuscate grief. It will come for you no matter what. You really have to live in it.

Dealing with death has also been tongue-in-cheek for Lazy Susan. Her popular podcast is called Death to Everyone and is an outlandish look at pop culture and the Apocalypse. Would you expect anything tamer from the eccentric mind of this title-winning queen?

The podcast is about two celestial goddesses, two drag icons, Zelda Moon and Lazy Susan, deciding what we’re going to put in our doomsday bunker from human culture. For example, which Spice Girl, which road sign, which drink, which thing from 7-11? So they all like going to the bunker while the rest goes into the apocalyptic wasteland. Living in the times that we’re living in, it’s kind of impossible not to think that we’re constantly on the brink of annihilation. So, we wanted to do something that at least made a bit of a joke out of it and had a bit of fun. We also just wanted a way to talk shit about everything that we could think about.

What would Lazy Susan exile from her bunker for 2025?

Mr. Beast is, unfortunately, going to be fraying in the apocalyptic wasteland unless he does something really camp soon. We just left Monster Energy drink; they’re going out in the cold in favor of Red Bull. Red Bull is making it into the doomsday bunker because it’s much chicer and fem coated. So yeah, these are the kinds of important questions that we do tackle. Which puppet gets into the bunker is so important because how do we memorialize puppets at the end of days?

Barreling into 2025 with a Drag Race crown, Lazy Susan does not want to slow down and has her sights on a feature film for this year. And her poignant message to her fans?

Bow to my reign or expect death. It will be swift. [Laughs]

Follow Lazy Susan on IG: @MsLazySusan

Death to Everyone is available wherever you listen to your podcasts

All episodes of Drag Race Down Under Season 4 are now available on WOW Presents Plus.

 

[All photos courtesy WOW Presents Plus]

Last modified: February 1, 2025

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