‘It Doesn’t Make Sense’: RuPaul Favourite Art Simone Is Still Shocked Over Her Elimination

RuPaul’s Drag Race: Down Under has lost its second queen and it was one of the most shocking eliminations in Drag Race history.

One of Australia’s leading drag queens, Art Simone (Jack Daye), was sent home after portraying Aussie darling Bindi Irwin in the infamous Snatch Game, failing to impress judges RuPaul, Michelle Visage and Rhys Nicholson.

“I was watching my world crumble,” Art told POPSUGAR Australia in an interview after her elimination. “And that’s why I was really shocked because I had so much more to give. I knew I didn’t deserve to be in the bottom two.”

Art was shocked because the queens were under the impression (no pun intended) that their game was one of the best in the franchise.

“Like it’s delusional, but we thought the Snatch Game was great,” she admitted. “It must be the editing, but Ru on set laughed at everything. No matter what you said, Ru laughed. But now that I look back, I thought, is that so they can cut around everything?”

She continued: “I’m a performer and I react to a room, so when I hear laughs, I think, ‘great, it’s working’.”

By far one of the hardest things to watch was Art’s reaction to being sent home, a reaction she believes was actually quite “refreshing”.

“There are so many drag queens in the franchise that get eliminated and they say, ‘Thank you for having me. It was wonderful.’ But this was raw emotion and I think it’s great that people got to see there’s a human behind all of that.”

According to the 28-year-old, it was “the worst day of my life”.

“It sounds so stupid,” she admitted, before adding: “But it’s like, when you’ve been working in your industry for this long, you’re aspiring for this moment and it gets taken away from you.

“I’m very cognisant if I’m bad and if I do a bad job and I looked like cr*p, I would have been like, ‘I get it. I get it. I really messed up.’ But I’m so self-critical and editorial that I was like, ‘No I know that I’m not the worst.’ So it was all of these little voices saying, ‘this doesn’t make sense’.”

Even though the outcome was not at all what Art had envisioned for herself, she actually wouldn’t change a thing.

“I could joke and say I would have done a different Snatch Game character and done an American that the judges would have understood but I really wanted to showcase my pride for Australian culture and I didn’t want to walk in there and be an American version of an Australian drag queen,” Art explained.

“I wouldn’t have done anything differently because I had fun up until that last five minutes.”

Stream RuPaul’s Drag Race: Down Under on Stan now, with new episodes dropping weekly.