Courtney Act Reveals How She and Bianca Broke the Rules on Drag Race

We’ve known for a while that RuPaul’s Drag Race has some pretty strict rules about how the contestants behave, and we know how RuPaul feels about saving the good stuff for the show. Last year, season seven finalist Pearl recounted that Ru once told her that “nothing you say matters unless that camera is rolling.”

And as it turns out, that’s a production-wide mentality. In an interview with Metro, season six finalist Courtney Act revealed that the queens aren’t even allowed to speak to each other if the cameras aren’t rolling.

“You are not allowed to talk when you’re not on camera,” Act explained. “It’s reality TV – they want to capture all the magic for the cameras so you’re sequestered away in rooms and [although] everyone gets in a minivan to the hotel everyday, you are not allowed to talk about what happens.”

But Act and Bianca Del Rio convinced producers to “allow us to have a topic that was unrelated [to the show]” to chat about in the van to and from the hotel. “Then we would sit in the back of the bus and put Darienne [Lake] up front with a topic like volcanoes then Darienne would jabber away with the others girls and the driver who made sure we didn’t talk about anything else.”

While the distraction took place, Act and Del Rio “sat in the back like the naughty kids talking: ‘Oh then this happened, and this happened, and she said this, and tomorrow I think this will happen.’ That was always funny.”

Act also confirmed that there are different versions of the show’s final cut, one for air and one for iTunes. “There was one ‘joke’ I made when RuPaul was talking about singing – it must have been the Rusical episode – and I jokingly said I had been working on my whistling tones and made a sound like a kettle boiling … In the episode on television it cut to like a deadpan shot of him not laughing, and then on iTunes it cuts to him laughing – which is what actually happened – and I did think that was weird, there were two different versions.” Does that mean there’s a version where Shangela wasn’t robbed?

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