Princess Poppy gives first interview since 'Drag Race' exit (2024)

RuPaul's Drag Race star Princess Poppy just wants to pop her self-professed "Princess Poppy p---y" alone and in peace, please.

In her first interview since taking a break from the spotlight following her elimination on season 15's third episode, Poppy exclusively tells EW's Quick Drag podcast (below) why she's been a stranger to social media — as well as her intention to take a step back from full-time drag "for the foreseeable future" as she explores different creative outlets for herself (and her adorable tumor, Princess Petunia).

"I want to fall off the face of the planet. I don't want to be famous, I want to fade into obscurity," Poppy tells EW of what she realized during her two-month period of reflection. "That's not a bad thing. I think people put so much emphasis on success and fame, and it's okay to not want to be famous. It's totally valid to not want to be known by a bunch of people. That's just not what I want. I don't want that for my life."

She stresses that "Princess Poppy is never going to go away," and that she's definitely "not quitting drag" altogether, but she will pull back on performing and touring after a likely appearance at DragCon in May.

"Princess Poppy is always going to be there. I'm always going to do it, but it's probably going to be a lot less frequent," she says. "Touring and doing drag all the time is really rough, it's tough on your body, and if you're not loving every minute, then it's difficult."

Poppy, a San Francisco-based queen who joined the show's biggest-ever cast of queens for season 15, says that she was already exhausted by the pressures of instant fame before the season premiered on Jan. 6.

"I feel like I got very burned out from doing the show and the experience. I went onto the show knowing that I'm not great with social media, and I don't overly enjoy that aspect of the career of drag.... it just became a lot, and I removed myself from it. I'm glad that I did, because I probably wouldn't be as happy as I am now without doing that," she explains. "I want to be left alone, I want to chill, I want to vibe. Drag, to me, as a career, wasn't always a long-term thing. I went into this process knowing that I don't want to pursue drag full-time, forever."

She says she's happy that she was part of the Drag Race legacy, though, mainly because of the queens she met during production — whom indirectly helped her realize that her heart wasn't in the competition.

Poppy recalls gathering in the Werk Room to shoot Untucked after that week's "All Queens Go to Heaven" acting challenge, and realizing that fellow competitor Jax took the judges' reactions to the performance to heart, and it didn't devastate her in the same way. That, Poppy observes, told her that her head wasn't in the game as much as her sisters'.

Still, she emphasizes that she doesn't regret filming her role on TV. She has, however, re-examined a joke she made on stage during her appearance at Naysha Lopez's weekly viewing party at Roscoe's Tavern in Chicago at the top of 2023. Poppy courted controversy when she spoke about putting chapstick up her nose in the hopes of evading a COVID test before getting on the show, though she goes on to clarify that situation to EW — while also recounting the "difficult" and "isolating" period it put her through after she received an onslaught of vitriol online.

"It was more of a joke.... I had COVID weeks before I left for Drag Race, and I wasn't sick at that point. I had not been sick for a while, and PCR tests, it shows up in your system for a while. There was an urgent care near my place, and I had to go there five to six times in one day to keep taking the tests. It kept coming back positive, and I'm like, I don't know what to do, I'm not sick, the doctor there is saying I'm not sick," she remembers, adding that she then saw a doctor outside of an urgent care setting, who provided her with a note explaining that she wasn't sick.

"That's why I got on the show: I had to get a doctor's note from the specific doctor to say I'm fine," she says. "I didn't actually even do [the chapstick in my nose]. My boyfriend Googled it and was like, 'Do this,' and I was like, 'I'm not going to sit here in the doctor's office and stick chapstick up my nose,' so we just laughed about it and thought it was hilarious. When I said the story, it seemed like I lied about having COVID and put chapstick up my nose to evade the test and get on, which wasn't the case. A lot of people thought I was going on the show and giving people COVID or that I lied about my test; I hadn't actually done the chapstick. It did not go up my nose."

RuPaul's Drag Race season 15 continues Friday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on MTV. Listen to Princess Poppy's full interview above, and check out more Quick Drag interviews with the season 15 cast in the podcast feed below.

Subscribe toEW's Quick Drag podcast for recaps of RuPaul's Drag Race, including reactions with the cast, special guests, and more.

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