“Without the shoes, I’m about six seven, with the shoes, about seven two,” says Banksie. “If you live in Northern Ireland and you’re over six foot six, you get disability benefit. I’d have £200 in my account every week. It would be lovely.”
She brims with the confidence of someone who easily dominates almost every room she walks into. It wasn’t always this way.
If you’re a little different, and growing up in Leigh in Wigan, being nearly seven feet tall would tend to make you a bit conspicuous when you didn’t necessarily want to be.
But Banksie, who shot to fame in series five of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (fans were gutted when she exited, convinced she was going to make it all the way), has turned all that into a ‘superpower’ instead.
“I think when I started drag, it was from a [place] of like, feeling like a little queer kid, who didn’t really get much attention,” she says.
“I was very effeminate, I was bullied quite a lot. So I found RuPaul’s Drag Race, loved it, wanted to try it, did that, and it gave me an element of confidence that I never had.
That’s the thing that drag is used for by a lot of people, as an escape. You walk into a club, and you can leave everything behind, and I think that’s what I use drag for the most.
“I was having a horrible time, went through horrible things living in Manchester, but I was able to put on my gladrags and turn it off, and have a great time with people on stage. And that was my superpower.
“And you drag that superpower into your day-to-day life. I’m way more confident than I used to be because of drag.”
Now an integral part of Manchester’s leading ‘drag family’, with the equally indomitable Cheddar Gorgeous and Anna Phylactic (‘drag parents’, as she calls them), Banksie is a leading force in not just the city’s but the UK’s drag scene.
She’d tried out for Drag Race four times before getting her shot, employing all kinds of fancy skills learned as a film student at the Manchester School of Art in her audition tapes. In the end, the bells and whistles proved unnecessary.
“I’d done five tapes,” she says. “Five years of auditions. I had a drone for the third one, I had multi-cameras. By the fifth one, I couldn’t be arsed, so I just did it on my phone. Sat there, did my make-up, talked, and they loved that one the most, because it was the most honest.”
Once on the show, she even found that she managed to get under the armour of the Drag Race’s now iconic host.
“There was one episode, and we were talking about relationships,” she says. “And she stood there for five minutes, talking to me directly about her own relationship and how that related to mine. We were back-and-forthing a lot. She was like ‘that’s so much like me and my partner’.
“I was like ‘you’re giving me a lot here, you’re supposed to be this strong vision, and you’re really opening up’. It was really nice. She was really supportive of a lot of us. I think I found that surprising.”
While RuPaul is clearly a role model and inspiration, others do get a look in. “Massive Bowie fan,” she says. “Hopefully going to get some tattoos of Bowie at some point. He changed my interpretation of what entertaining could be. He never followed anyone else’s rules.”
Despite the relatively new-found notoriety that has come in the wake of Drag Race, there’s none of the ego that might come with it.
“There are so many drag entertainers out there who are different, better, everything than me, that are just as inspiring,” she says. “It’s just the fact that I had a jump pad on the telly.”
Banksie will host the Studio 24 weekend of parties at Maya from 22 to 25 August, as part of Manchester Pride.
Read more:
Eat Well MCR to host the Eat Well Do Good festival
Blue plaque for Manchester music icon Denise Johnson
Manchester Literature Festival announces 2024 line-up
