Michelle Visage: ‘In another life, I was a gay, black, British man’ “Disgoosting”, says Michelle Visage. “Buh-bble”. The American television star and queen of RuPaul’s Drag Race is practising her Yorkshire accent […]

“Disgoosting”, says Michelle Visage. “Buh-bble”. The American television star and queen of RuPaul’s Drag Race is practising her Yorkshire accent and it is quite something. “I’m he-yah for four munths”, she adds, a faintly quizzical look on her face.

This isn’t just for fun. From tonight, Visage joins the cast of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, the hit West End musical about a Sheffield school boy who wants to be a drag queen. She will play Miss Hedge, Jamie’s authoritarian and not especially supportive teacher, for four months – an all-singing, all-dancing, all-rapping and, ee bah gum, all-Yorkshire role.

Read more: ‘It’s a dream’ – Dan Gillespie Sells on writing Everybody’s Talking About Jamie i's TV newsletter: what you should watch next Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

“I said, ‘She can be American, she’s a teacher, teachers travel!’” says Visage. But the producers were adamant they wanted a northern Hedge. “My Rs have to be DEAD. They no longer exist,” she adds. The dialect coaching has been intense for the New Jerseyan whose natural tendency is towards the nasal, the snap and the snarl. “My brain is literally mushy peas by the end of it.”

The main thing on her side, besides her charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent, is that Visage loves Britain, to the point of obsession. She loves the cities, the accents (“I hear even subtle differences between Lancashire and Yorkshire”), the culture, and especially the tv (“I watch Towie. I connect with it”). Today she is wearing a Harry Potter sweatshirt – “Primark! My husband said, ‘Is that a snitch on your boob?’” – with black leggings and pink leopard-print UGG boots from which two matching lightning bolt tattoos poke out and zip up the back of her calves.

She first came to the UK when she was 13 years old. “And fell in LOVE. I always feel like there’s an otherworldly connection. In another life, I was a gay, black, British man. One hundred per cent.” As a straight, white, American woman why does she think that? “You just figure things out. I firmly believe in past lives. When you have such a connection with something, there has to be an explanation.

“There’s a sense of peace and serenity that I get here that I don’t get in the United States. In other countries I feel like a fish out of water and I don’t in the UK.”

‘I firmly believe in past lives. When you have such a connection with something, there has to be an explanation’

British viewers will know Visage from seven series of RuPaul’s Drag Race (and its various spin-offs) where she is Ru’s right hand woman, a ballsy, busty fixture on the judging panel, doling out catty one-liners (“I’m finding it hard to believe that this is your best drag…”), sassy finger wags and cackles (“Ha ha HAAAA!”) to all comers. Think Cruella de Vil mixed with the bitch Craig Revel Horwood wishes he was.

Musical theatre, though, is her “ultimate love”. She got her first job in “I Remember Mama” aged 13, won $500 in a Madonna lookalike competition aged 16 and aged 18 went to study musical theatre in New York. A year later, she joined a girl band called Seduction (She got an audition by calling up the manager and telling him, “you need a white girl for this group”. When he said he already had one, she said, “but you don’t have me”). It led to various other pop projects – including a cover of “Lovely Day” which ended up on the soundtrack of The Bodyguard – and eventually television.

So Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is a homecoming of sorts. She auditioned for it, just like in the old days. “I came in and did my thing and they literally offered it to me right there on the spot,” she says proudly.

“When she opened her mouth to sing, she had the most fantastic voice,” Nica Burns, the show’s producer, says. “Our jaws all dropped. She can really belt.”

It has been a quick turnaround with only two weeks of rehearsals. “I’m really proud of myself, because I can’t remember shit. There’s times when I can’t remember what I had for lunch…” The other day she went to see Company in the theatre down the road. “Of course I saw it. Patti LuPone is my queen, make no mistake about it. There’s Madonna in the pop world – and Patti in the theatre world. Along with Bernadette [Peters], Chita [Rivera] and, um, Bette [Midler]. Probably in that order.”

‘I’m such a drag queen – the nails, the hair, the eyeliner, the lashes, the everything’

Is she nervous about making her West End debut, aged 50? “Well, I was texting Patti Lupone, if I can name drop for a second and she said to me, ‘it’s amazing that the nerves never go away.’ And that means we care. So, yeah, I’ll be nervous, I’ll be excited, I’ll have to poop, I’ll be adrenalised, like every other theatre kid. If you don’t go through it, This. Is. Not. For. You. Honestly.”

She raps her nails – long, curved, beige with a scarlet underside on the table. Her glasses are also bright red, huge and angular like twin set squares. She likes to buy sunglasses and put prescription lenses in them as the designs are so much wilder. “Buy a pair from Primark for a £1, take them to Specsavers. Not these, these are Wildfox,” she says. “I’m such a drag queen – the nails, the hair, the eyeliner, the lashes, the everything.”

Michelle Lynn Shupack was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and adopted at nine months. While her upbringing was happy, the Jamie musical appeals to her, she says, because her own high-school experience was “miserable”, coloured by loneliness, bullying and eating disorders. “I did not fit in at all, which is why I ended up in the gay community,” she says.

‘My mother would say, ‘Listen, you need to go out to the clubs if you want to be discovered”

When she went to study theatre in New York it was her mother who encouraged her to get out and find her tribe, sending her a fake ID in the mail. “She would say, ‘Listen, you need to go out to the clubs if you want to be discovered.’”

So off she went to the Underground club where she met a Puerto Rican called David. “He said, ‘you’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.’ I was like, ‘Who are you talking to? Me?’ He brought me down into this back room and into a group of about 20 to 30 really weird, really freaky kids of every colour – I was the only white girl. That was it, I never, ever left. And that’s the scene where I met RuPaul.”

She and RuPaul met when Visage – she adopted the name for voguing competitions – was 18 or 19, but it wasn’t until she auditioned for a DJ slot on WKTU some years later that they were thrown together. “He walked in the room and said ‘Oh my god, of course it’s you! This was what was supposed to happen.’ They went from radio to co-presenting The RuPaul Show for two years.

“He said to me, ‘you’re a fucking superstar’. I was literally floored. The only person I’d ever heard that from was my mother. That stuck with me forever. He’s still the person who says it to me every day of my life.”

‘RuPaul said to me, ‘you’re a fucking superstar’. That stuck with me forever. He’s still the person who says it to me every day of my life’

Earlier this year, RuPaul’s Drag Race won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Programme, the culmination of over three decades of friendship. “It was a moment in time, but it is not going to last forever. We saw it in 1996 when The RuPaul Show was the second biggest show on VH1. But we were before its time. The world is much slower than the gay world is.

“I tell the kids, make your money now, save your money. RuPaul is an entity – one we’ll never see again. We’re putting out all these talented kids, but there’s only one RuPaul. So we have to enjoy this moment.”

They have just shot an 11th season of Drag Race and a fourth series of its All Stars spin-off is on its way. Visage is desperate to do a UK version and has been working on it for five years. “I’ve been selling my soul to every devil in town. It’s the commissioners – they’re scared that you don’t have the talent. I have reassured them that you do, I’ve seen it. I’ve put together a wish list already. It’s just a matter of what channel and when.”

While the old guard of talent shows, like The X Factor, are running out of steam, Visage thinks Drag Race could run forever. “Because of this show, the artform of drag, that I’ve loved since I was 17 years old, is now being seen as a viable form of art and it’s shifting.”

Read more: RuPaul and Queer Eye are the Emmys icons that the mainstream needs

It is. RuPaul was criticised earlier this year for saying that he would “probably not” allow a trans woman on the show; he later apologised. Visage flicks her hands. “I have many trans friends. I had them back when trans wasn’t even called trans, it was just called gay or queer or whatever. The movement has grown a lot and because of that there’s more emphasis on the trans girls who go into Drag Race. I’ve known trans women to be showgirls since the dawn of day. They’ve always performed in drag and they are the fiercest queens.”

Visage has occasionally been criticised for talking about “her” gay community but she refuses to stop being a pleasingly noisy advocate for it. “Gay people are not going to shut the world down. I don’t understand why we’re marginalising a community that has nothing to do with you and your hate. You are a Bible thumper, let Jesus take care of it, go have a bath, don’t worry. Let your gay neighbour do what they want to do.

“Trump’s America gives people – ie Kanye – the go-ahead to be insane. I’m going to retract the word ‘insane’ – to act on their hate. We gotta stop that. That’s why I’m glad I’m here. Not kidding. I might go from this show to another show, just to stay.”

She lives in LA most of the time, though she has homes in New York and in north London, too. She met her husband, screenwriter David Case under a tree in Central Park when he was studying to be an actor at New York’s Juilliard School and they have two teenage daughters, called Lola and Lillie. She is also a fierce advocate for young people and mental health awareness. “As the mother of a daughter who was suicidal, [I think] kids, especially in the queer community and trans community, aren’t taken seriously.

“I didn’t know what to do when it started with my daughter. I was lost, and I didn’t know what to do as a parent. Sometimes it just takes parents stopping and listening.”

Lillie, her older daughter identified as non-binary in the past and is bisexual, which took Visage a while to get used to. “I am here admitting that bisexuality to me wasn’t a real thing because growing up, the gay boys I knew were all bi because that was the easier way to come out. It was always a gateway to gay – it was safer for them in the 80s. Bi was always an eye-roll for me.”

‘Bisexuality to me wasn’t a real thing because growing up, the gay boys I knew were all bi because that was the easier way to come out’

Over the past three years, she has changed her mind. “Because I have a daughter who identifies as bi but I think she’s gay and she just needs to go through a process. I said that to her and she said, ‘please don’t tell me who I am’. Alright. Shut your mother up, you’re right. She doesn’t really like the labels, I just think she’s coming into her queerness and her identity. She can be that and I’m the perfect mother for that.”

Anyone who has listened to What’s the Tee, the award-winning podcast she co-hosts with RuPaul will be used to Visage’s particular brand of openness. The pair have also just shot the pilot for a new daily chat show which will begin in 2019. Do they ever argue?

“You couldn’t work with somebody that closely if you hated them. You just couldn’t. Ant and Dec actually love each other. Michelle and Ru actually love each other. We do properly love being together.”

Michelle Visage stars in ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ at the Apollo Theatre, London to 26 January 2019 (0330 333 4809)