Amanda Tori Meating thought it was her “week to win” on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16 Episode 5. Then she was sent home.
The drag queen was the greenest of the cast, having only gotten into the artform a couple of years prior. But with the Episode 5 maxi challenge being performance-based, this musical theater-trained diva was ready to win it all. She delivered one of the night’s best performances in the Girl Group challenge, and helping with lyric writing and choreography in rehearsals impressed her competitors (especially rival Plane Jane). But her runway look didn’t please the judges. Even though the birds nest idea was creative, host RuPaul didn’t think it served the pussy cat wig theme.
When RuPaul opened the floor up to critiques, asking each queen to reveal who they think should go home that night, Amanda’s stomach dropped. “I was like, ‘Oh, this does not look good for Miss Amanda Tori Meating tonight,’” she tells TV Insider. “I think I crushed it,” she adds.
Hearing her co-stars say she should be sent home not because of her performance that week in particular, but because her drag aesthetic wasn’t up to their standards, was “gut-wrenching” for the queen. That feeling carried into Episode 5’s Untucked installment. “The vibe that viewers will see of me in Untucked Episodes 1 through 4 vs. Episode 5 is very different. I walked in there and it felt sort of out of body. I just was like, ‘oh my God, what is happening? This does not make sense with my fantasy.’”
Then a hilarious realization hit the performer. “I was in Untucked, and I realized I wasn’t wearing panties,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to have to lip sync and I’m wearing a skirt and no panties.’ I’m death-gripping [Dawn’s hand] at the table. My fingers are interlocked with hers, and she’s just sort of petting me like a stressed out little cat. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, Dawn, I’m not wearing panties.’ And I looked down and she’s wearing them over her zebra bodysuit. I was like, ‘Please, sister, please give me your panties.’ And she did. She really did. She’s such a good sister like that.”
Amanda was up against Q in the lip-sync battle. They danced to Icona Pop’s “Emergency,” but Amanda has no recollection of it. “I felt like my spirit left my body the moment the music started. I really have no firsthand memory of that lip sync whatsoever.”
“It makes me just sort of anxious to see how it reads on camera,” she adds of the performance. “The whole pussycat situation was not very, how you say, pussy for me. I’m used to wearing hair that I can toss around when I perform, so I definitely felt a bit taken out of my own personal fantasy. I wanted to give it my all and fight as hard as I could to stay, and if I wasn’t going to be the one to stay, then I just really wanted to earn it and give as good of a performance as I could.”
Amanda’s elimination also brought an end to her season-long beef with Plane Jane, whom she confronted over rude comments in Episode 5. Plane can’t say she didn’t earn the ire, as she said she didn’t respect Amanda’s drag out of nowhere while in a disagreement with Q. Amanda gives us an update on her and Plane’s relationship since filming wrapped.
“I’ll say in the months that followed filming, we did not really communicate much,” she shares. “So there was not much relationship building outside of what we saw onscreen. That was sort of the extent of our communication, and then I think in the recent weeks since things have sort of gotten on Twitter, we’ve begun a private dialogue in the iMessages, which I think has been constructive. I think that she and I are moving to a place where we can at least, I think, be co-workers and speak to each other with respect and share a space cordially. So that’s always good.”
Amanda has taken Plane and the other queens’ comments about her drag aesthetic to heart.
“I would say while we were there, the comments, they did a lot to me, honestly. They pissed me off,” she admits. “I always say that nothing motivates me like rage, so I just was really pissed and I was like, ‘I know that I am a sickening diva, and I don’t deserve [this].”
It did open her eyes to the possible holes in her preparation before coming onto the show. “The Amanda Tori Meating that I was intending to present on Drag Race would not be getting critiqued on her makeup,” she says, “so it was a thing where I was like, ‘Oh, why are we talking about this instead of how sickening I am?’ It sort of made me want to prove people wrong and show that I could take a note and apply it and I’m not just some blundering little idiot girl who wandered in off Hollywood Boulevard … There were some comments being made, like ‘Your drag isn’t polished enough for Season 16,’ and I was like, well, clearly somebody thought it was because I’m here.”
Now, her drag is new and improved.
“What it made me do was sort of go back to the drawing board,” Amanda shares. “I got this journal and I wrote Amanda Tori Meating in the middle of the page, and I just started writing adjectives around my name that I thought were things that I wanted to be staples of my aesthetic. Perhaps I should have done this before Drag Race, but here we are. There’s always a time for something.”
Her “post-elimination brainstorm” led to the aesthetic fans have seen since the Drag Race Season 16 premiere event and other public appearances since. If and when the opportunity to compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars arrives, Amanda Tori Meating will be ready.
RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fridays, 8/7c, MTV
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