Jinkx Monsoon is Them’s 2024 Now Award honoree in Art. The Now Awards honor 10 LGBTQ+ vanguards at the forefront of culture and change today. Read more here.
Sporting a black dress, kitten heels, and a flapper-style fascinator adorning her signature copper coif, Jinkx Monsoon glides into her office: New York City’s Westside Theatre. She escorts me up the stairs toward the upstairs lobby, where audiences wait nightly to see her star as Audrey in the off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors. But today, the lobby is locked. Monsoon is unflappable, problem-solving with a Virgo’s acuity as she finds someone to unlatch the bolt. It’s not the first door she’s figured out how to open.
Few RuPaul’s Drag Race queens have successfully transitioned from reality TV star to working actor. Between her starring role on the Great White Way and her recent critically acclaimed turn in Doctor Who, it’s clear Monsoon has made the leap with panache.
“In the industry, when you come from reality TV, it’s like, ‘OK, so you’re a reality TV entertainer!’” Monsoon tells me as we sit at a table near the window overlooking 43rd Street. “I didn’t want to do anything within the reality sphere [after Drag Race.]”
Anyone who watched Monsoon take home the crown on season five of the competition show could see that she possessed a rare comedic gift — and that she approached RuPaul’s acting challenges with a method deserving of a James Lipton sit-down. But afterward, few casting agents trusted her with anything beyond a sort of facsimile of her reputation as “Seattle’s premier Jewish narcoleptic drag queen,” as she famously introduced herself.
After turning down multiple offers to do more reality TV, Monsoon agreed to be cast on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars season 7, ten years later, in 2021, but with a clear mission: communicate to the show’s massive audience how refined her acting tools were. Rather than focusing on her quirks, Monsoon turned the show into a season-long exhibition, earning plaudits for her hilarious Snatch Game portrayals of Judy Garland and Natasha Lyonne. “Drag Race shows your multiple talents; it’s like a demo reel,” she says. “I was fortunate that people saw that I was a drag queen and an actor.” When Monsoon went on to win the season, she became the only contestant in Drag Race history to have triumphed twice.
The second time was the charm. Since 2022, Monsoon has blossomed as an artist, enjoying a record-breaking turn as Matron “Mama” Morton in Broadway’s Chicago, releasing her own stand-up comedy special, and announcing a new name, Hera Hoffer, though the trans artist continues to use Monsoon professionally. Like any famous actor, she even released her own perfume line. Most recently, Monsoon performed eight shows a week as Audrey, the ingénue heart of Little Shop of Horrors, imbuing the character with a grounded absurdity not every actor can muster.
When I saw Monsoon as Audrey on a Wednesday night in May, it was clear much of the enthusiasm for the rock-horror musical was, in truth, for her. Many in the audience were already wearing merch sporting her face. Someone as naturally funny as Monsoon could be forgiven for sleep-walking through such a comedic role; the Snatch Game legend only has to walk onstage to elicit wild cheers and loud guffaws. But as she rendered a heartfelt rendition of “Suddenly, Seymour,” I could tell Monsoon wasn’t just delivering campy winks to an adoring audience; she was showing us Audrey’s arc, right up to the moment the plucky heroine gets gobbled by a plant. We weren’t putty in her manicured hands simply because she was a star, but because we were being taken on a journey by an actor who had done the work.
Even in casual conversation, her love for the “puzzle of the text,” as she calls it, is evident. “I love text analysis,” she says, lighting up like a Stanislavski student. “You’re finding the person that exists between the character and you.” Even now, she is still learning: during her Chicago run, she watched co-star James T. Lane imbue the presumably straight lawyer Billy Flynn with a coded queerness that later helped her add layers to her Audrey. “It changed the way I thought about character building,” she says.
Following classic turns by cis actresses including Constance Wu and Evan Rachel Wood, Monsoon’s Audrey adds nuance to the character’s rough-and-tumble backstory. “I’m not heavy-handedly playing Audrey as a transfeminine person,” she says. Rather, she hopes that her choices invite multiple interpretations. “It’s not easy to imagine her as a transfeminine person, but also it’s not that hard,” she says. One of the show’s signature numbers, “Somewhere That’s Green,” an ode to wanting a small plot of land and a piece of the American Dream, accrues added meaning when considering the identity of the performer. “If an audience member watches the show and then gives any thought to the gender or the genitalia of Audrey, I’ve done my work,” she tells me.
Nowadays, Monsoon the person and the drag persona exist in a reciprocal relationship, each borrowing from the other and growing together. As a person, Hera has become more feminine; and as a persona, Jinkx Monsoon has embraced sobriety and come out as a “witch.” Monsoon sees her professional alias less as a constricting costume that hides who she is and more like a negotiated approximation of herself. “If she ever felt limiting, it would be now that she’s more of a brand than she ever was before,” Monsoon says. “She is an extension of me, but she’s also a creation of mine and the face of my work, but she’s never felt limiting.”
Similarly, Monsoon has never drawn clear divisions between drag and acting, applying the same skills to each. “All drag queens are making classic clown forms,” she says. “I started thinking about how that extends to my character work and then I started realizing that every character is drag.”
Fighting the double stigma of being a drag performer and a reality TV star makes her current trajectory even more impressive. But Monsoon is humble about breaking out of the Drag Race galaxy. “I’m not the first drag queen to do what I’m doing,” she says, rattling off a list of people who have inspired her, including Miss Coco Peru, Varla Jean Merman, and Peaches Christ. “I feel privileged to get to take everything I’ve learned from the elders in our community, the drag queens who came before me, and pay it forward to the next generation of younger queer people.”
Though Monsoon may be reluctant to linger on being a booked-and-busy actor, other Ru girls are quick to call her post-Drag Race success admirable. “Seeing Jinkx take that opportunity and expand it and take her career to new heights is inspiring,” All Stars season 2 winner Alaska Thunderfuck tells Them via email. “She continues to break barriers for the young people of the world to follow their dreams, as well.”
Those new heights now include a role in one of the most recognizable sci-fi TV series of all time. Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies approached Monsoon personally to play Maestro after seeing her cabaret show Together Again, Again! in Manchester, pitching the character as a mix of the Joker, the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and her own drag persona. Not only did the part tick several boxes off Monsoon’s career bucket list — including playing a villain and flying — the role was a “really nuanced character that has layers to play [with].” Monsoon delights in summing up her take on the malefactor: “extremely powerful, immortal, bored, passionate about art, and with an inferiority complex centered around their daddy issues.” As with her Audrey, Maestro exists between what’s on the page and Monsoon’s own idiosyncrasies; the character, who hopes to horde the world’s creativity by stealing music itself, has her signature reverberating cackle, which she suffuses with giddy malevolence.
Monsoon’s “scene-stealing” performance has earned rave reviews from critics and acting partners alike, including Ncuti Gatwa, who says that he and co-star Millie Gibson were both in “complete awe” of her. “She is one of the most skilled and talented performers I’ve seen,” Gatwa tells me in a statement. “To also be a delight of a human being, as well, is simply not fair on the rest of us.”
Gatwa’s dual praise of Monsoon’s acting acumen and her humanity is a reminder that, ever since her first Drag Race win in 2013, she has been on parallel journeys. While seeking to be taken seriously for her craft, Monsoon has also sought to understand the place her transfeminine identity occupies between herself and her persona. “I compartmentalized my femininity to Jinkx,” she says. “Every step I’ve taken towards my femininity has felt better and has been a step in the right direction.”
In 2015, Monsoon came out as “genderless” on social media; two years later, she used the terms “non-gendered/non-binary” to describe herself. Now out as trans, Monsoon uses she/her pronouns both in and out of drag. For a long time, Monsoon put off a physical transition — not because she wasn’t experiencing feelings of dysphoria, she clarifies, but because she believed she could push through the pain.
“It was like, ‘Oh, I don’t feel depressed because I go to work every day and I do my job!’’’ she recalls. “But is it just okay? Is it just like teetering on that line of ‘one thing could go wrong and then suddenly I’m in a pit of despair’? Just because you get used to living with something doesn’t mean it’s serving you, you know?”
Monsoon compares it to getting sober. “I got used to being an alcoholic; it wasn't doing me any good! So I got really used to being, like, okay with a certain amount of expression. And then it gets to a point where life feels too short to just keep feeling okay with things, and you want to take steps.”
In 2020, Monsoon had a hair transplant, which the performer makes a point to refer to as her first gender-affirming surgery. “I have talked to so many trans people — transmasculine people, transfeminine people — and hair is a big conversation,” she says. “Losing my hair took away my access to my feminine in so many ways.”
But even as she began medically transitioning, Monsoon continued to weigh the delicate interplay between her work and personal life. When she underwent facial feminization surgery in February, she opted not to get work done on her nose for fear that it could impact her singing voice. “I would hate to make an aesthetic change that would affect that,” she says.
As Monsoon’s relationship to her femininity has changed, so too has her relationship to her drag alter ego. There has been a sort of “merging” of her performative and civilian selves that allows her to eschew any hard, fast lines around gender presentation in everyday life. Through that melding process, Monsoon is now bringing new parts of herself to her drag: “Jinkx is now even more an extension of me as a human being rather than just being her own persona that exists in liminal space,” she says.
Once the manifestation of her most dialed-up self, Monsoon the creation and the creator are closer than ever. “She’s kind of my Audrey II,” she says, calling back to the carnivorous intergalactic plant from Little Shop. “I feed her, she gets bigger.” Then, with a grin and a mischievous flicker in her eye, she adds, “But she hasn’t required blood sacrifice.”
Photographer: Matthew Leifheit
Stylist: Roberto Johnson
Makeup Artist: Mollie Gloss
Hair Stylist: Davey Matthew
Set Designer: Selena Liu
Producer: Ian Crane
Editor-in-Chief: Sarah Burke
Art Director: Wesley Johnson
Talent Director: Keaton Bell
Senior Culture Editor: Samantha Allen
Editor: Wren Sanders
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