Bianca Del Rio, the record-breaking, RuPaul’s Drag Race-winning, indefatigably touring American drag performance artist, is sitting in a hotel room in Brazil the day before the 2024 US election.

“I’m just … torn,” she says. “I’m looking at my phone and trying to understand and read between the lines and the polls, and who’s saying this and who’s saying that. I feel like I’m someone waiting for a test result from a clinic about a sexually transmitted disease. Just horrified to find out.”

Dubbed “the Joan Rivers of the drag world” by The New York Times, and the first drag queen to headline Carnegie Hall and Wembley Arena, Del Rio, otherwise known as Roy Haylock, is 10 months into a year-long world tour that has so far spanned the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, mainland Europe, Asia and South America. “This has been my sixth solo tour that I’ve travelled with in the past 10 or 11 years,” she says. “It’s been quite the wild ride.”

The show, Dead Inside, which tours Australia from February, holds true to Del Rio’s talent for uncompromisingly tell-it-like-it-is humour. Fired by a notoriously vicious wit, it features avid audience-roasting, exquisitely constructed costumes, hair and make-up and unrepentantly rude, caustic and whip-smart stand-up.

To a globe of fans, Del Rio is speaking her truth. “I don’t mean my truth as in my story,” she says. “I don’t take myself too seriously. I know that we’re all on this planet for a very short time, and I hope to remind people that I’m the biggest joke there is – I’m a man in a wig. Come on now. It’s obvious I didn’t think these choices through properly.”

Del Rio’s instinct is to find the humour in everything, whether it be a birthday party or a funeral. “There are people who’ve said, ‘You can’t say that’, or, ‘You shouldn’t say that,’” she says. “And I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, shut up.’ You’ve got to fight it because it’s a natural thing for me to do. I communicate through all of the digs, all of the nastiness [in my comedy]. I mean, some of the people I love the most are the ones who I totally beat up verbally on a daily basis.”

Born in Louisiana in 1975, Del Rio shot to fame after winning season six of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2014 (Australian Courtney Act was a runner-up). Creative yearnings as a child had led to designing costumes for opera and theatre, starting drag performance at 21, moving to New York soon after and evolving Bianca Del Rio’s persona, style and comedy chops in clubs, theatres and cable and online TV shows.

Winning Drag Race led to a role in the 2019 West End production of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (and the screen adaptation) and making her own movies – 2016 revenge comedy Hurricane Bianca (co-starring SNL star Rachel Dratch and actor and singer Alan Cumming) and 2018 sequel Hurricane Bianca: From Russia with Hate. She’s also written an advice book, Blame it on Bianca Del Rio: The Expert on Nothing with an Opinion on Everything (sample: “You’re right; it is hard to get a decent paying job at 60 years of age. Maybe you should look into being a ‘lab rat’ for pharmaceutical companies.”)

Del Rio says she never planned her career. “Honestly, do you think a normal person would have chosen this life?” she says, laughing. “No. It’s literally been saying yes to everything. My logic behind that is you can experience it. Sometimes you experience magic, and other times you experience something so horrible that you can then put it in your show. It just evolved from, ‘Hey, would you like to be in a show?’ and ‘Hey, would you like to work at a gay bar?’ to ‘Hey, why don’t you do a reality show?’ In no way did I ever think, plot, plan or assume this is where I would be.”

De Rio pauses. “And, when I say, where I would be, I’m in a cheap hotel in Brazil.”

Growing up, Del Rio briefly assumed a career as an art teacher beckoned.
“That was something against the norm in my particular family,” she says. “It was, ‘You need to do something more productive’, or, ‘You need to do sports.’
The usual stuff in the ’80s at that time. It’s kind of wild that everything I was punished for as a child, I’m celebrated for now. Being artistic, or being flamboyant or being sassy or voicing my opinion, they were all things that you shouldn’t be as a young male. So it’s quite funny now that that is exactly what I do, what I get paid to do. And those people who opposed it, I’m paying their bills with that money.”

And, when not at home in Palm Springs, she revels in the opportunity to perform live, no matter the touring schedule. “We’ve been out for months but the craziness of it all is that despite your feet hurting, or your corset being too tight, or late travel delays, or not enough sleep the night before, once you hit that stage, it all just goes away,” she says. “Your brain just goes into another world. Once you’re out there, you just fly high for those two hours and go, ‘Oh, I’m so lucky I get to do this.’”

There’s a certain discomfort with heels, wigs, eyelashes and corsets that makes her meaner on stage, she says. “Then, when you get offstage, reality hits,” she says. “Your knees are killing. Your eyelashes are falling off. You’re sweating like hell. You have lipstick on your teeth. And you go, ‘Yep, this is my life.’”

Dead Inside, she says, is an ever-changing show, powered by current events, observations in each city and a passion for close and personal audience interaction. She will not be raking over recent political events.

“What I’ve experienced over the years is the audience that I see now is not the audience I had expected,” she says. “Because when I started drag in 1996, I was performing in gay bars or cabaret spaces or theatres, which is a specific audience. Then, you find out later, I have a lot of straight girls and their husbands that come to see me, or couples that I didn’t expect, that come out to every tour that I do. So I never try to alienate them on that way. There’s so much more I can alienate them with comedy.”

As the sun sinks in Brazil and Del Rio tries to block out the yet-to-be-decided political landscape of her home country, there is time to reflect on suitcases. Already travelling with a suite of neon and black sequinned kaftans, blazers, swing coats, gowns, boots, heels and jewellery and a battalion of false eyelashes, her bags have reached a new and unwieldy bursting point.

“It’s funny because I’m one of those people that starts out rather tame with my luggage and then, as I go, I’ve collected so much stuff,” she says, alluding to a love of shopping for cheap fashion. “I go, ‘Oh, I could use this. Oh, this is wonderful. This is great.’ And people that come to the show bring me gifts. So I end up with all of this amazing stuff that I have to stuff into my luggage. It is a lot.”

She sighs. “But I guess that’s the whole point of drag. It’s not really drag unless you’re dragging a bag behind you.”

Bianca Del Rio - Dead Inside is at The Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, January 31-Feb 2; State Theatre, Sydney, February 7-8; and Llewellyn Hall, Canberra, February 11.