Chad: Besides Ru, I don’t think a whole lot of drag queens have their own talk shows... but you do! Can you tell me about creating Shot with Soju?

Soju: The reason why I created Shot with Soju was because I wanted to see it myself. I’m probably my show’s biggest fan. I was tired of seeing Hey Qween over and over again and just wanted to see more drag online, so I stopped waiting and created my own show.

Chad: Did you get a sense of how much of this week’s challenge was scripted? I’m guessing a lot of the “news” segments were pre-written, and then the DIY portions seemed looser and more made up by the queens. What’s your approach to preparing versus improvising on your show?

Soju: I used to write all my questions down and read off of my phone. It was good, but I felt like the conversations and the flow of the interview weren’t authentic.I think once you study the topics and the subject of the general conversation, you can then just go off script and just bouncing back and forth with your guest. That’s how I did the episode with Detox and Alaska and you could see that everyone there was comfortable.

Chad: In rehearsal, Charlie seemed irritated with Cynthia’s grasp of English. Who do you think had the right approach, Cynthia or Charlie? How do you think an ESL person should approach tricky wording in scripted material?

Soju: I think it was so much BULL! Charlie is the type of person NO ONE wants to work with. Besides the whole ESL moment, she’s just aggressive and not a team player. I have an accent, and my ESL shows during my show. I own it and move on. Of course people give me a hard time sometimes, but I say, “Hey, I got a degree and I’m a working drag queen with a talk show.” ESL is not a weakness.