Queen Priyanka

Here I am: a true-blue Mormon boy and all around just some guy in a baseball hat from Provo, Utah. I’m sitting across from Queen Priyanka: one of Canada’s most glamorous drag queens and a rising pop star and television personality.

We’re an odd couple if there ever was one. I love it.

“Okay, I’m literally a drag show virgin here, right?” I say. “I have not been to a drag show, but I was a theater kid.”

Queen Priyanka grins. “Oh, so you understand the vibes!” We both laugh before she says, “You understand that it's just people believing in their creation.”

“Right. I’m also a musician myself. But I've struggled since leaving musical theater because I feel like my most carefree, fun performances have been when I'm playing somebody else. But then when I’m onstage as me… ” I sigh. This conversation got deep really fast. “I have never figured out a frontman persona and I feel like I'm perpetually going to be trapped off to the side because I just can't feel comfortable in my own skin.”

Queen Priyanka thinks for a moment. “I had a neighbor call me obnoxious when I was a child,” she recalls. “It was like, my friend's mom – like an older lady. She was like, ‘He’s just so obnoxious.’ And I remember it caused me to be more quiet in my childhood and not want to go outside anymore.”

Withdrawn, embarrassed, this young Mark Suknanan also attended a Catholic school. Though closeted, he was bullied. He’d have to hide at school so he could listen to Bollywood music and Britney Spears in peace without being asked what he was listening to. But at home alone, he would dance and sing his heart out in his bedroom to Pussycat Dolls.

“I have thought about this exact thing that you talked about,” Queen Priyanka says after sharing some poignant and painful memories of her childhood with me. “My frontman persona has come from what I dreamed of being as a kid. What childhood dream am I fulfilling? When I was in my bedroom performing back in the day – baby, I was in an arena. Sure, nobody was actually in my room and I looked like garbage, but I was giving 100%.”

As she shared this with me, it sent memories of my own childhood flooding back. When I was playing the family piano in my living room, it’s like the walls of the house would fall away and I was in Madison Square Garden and everyone’s lighters were out. I was dreaming big.

“So that's who we need to be, whether we’re in rehearsal, or in the middle of the stage or at the side or at the back nowhere to be seen,” she says.

Hailing from Toronto, Queen Priyanka has a bold, brash, vibrant, and colorful personality. Hearing that “obnoxious” was used to describe her as a child breaks my heart. Sure, she came into our meeting with guns blazing and animated expressions and some good natured teasing. But it never felt self-centered and was never ill-timed. Her personality is underpinned by years of hard work, self discovery, and painful life experience that manifests as a lively sense of humor and a deep desire to help others feel happy and free.

Those attributes have led to a varied and multifaceted career as a children’s television entertainer, a reality competition star, and most prominently as a drag queen and rising pop artist. Priyanka won the first season of Canada’s Drag Race in 2020 and has since gone on to appear on season 2 of Canada's Drag Race as a guest; guest judge Canada's Drag Race: Canada vs. the World; and make several appearances on RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. She is now the host of We're Here on HBO alongside Jaida Essence Hall and Sasha Velour.

A major recent development in her television career is the upcoming show Drag Brunch Saved My Life, where Queen Priyanka visits struggling restaurants and gets them to host drag brunch shows in order to save their businesses. It’ll premiere on Crave as part of the 2024-25 television season.

What’s crazy, though, is that Queen Priyanka never intended to be a drag queen. Growing up feeling “obnoxious,” Mark Suknanan didn’t realize he was just a showman. All the things people saw in him that were so negative were really just positive talents misapplied. As Queen Priyanka tells me, once she found the proper application of her talents, everything in life got better.

“Last night I went to Starry Night. It's an event in Toronto, and it’s where I used to go in the Toronto Gay Village at the time I moved there,” she remembers. “When I moved there I was like, whoa, gay people! Whoa. Drag queens? They’re a little bit scary. I don't know about this. Don’t look at me, don’t look at me, don’t look at me.”

But then Mark had a drag queen perform at his birthday. After getting to know each other, the drag queen suggested that Mark should try drag. “She said, ‘You do kids TV. You have this personality.’ And I was like, drag, though? Dressing up as a woman? Like everything that my parents told me not to do? Everything? YTV wouldn't even let me wear wigs on camera. Like there's no way that I'm going to do that, right?”

At the time, Mark wanted to be a man’s man. Go on first dates and wear a plaid shirt and order a beer, thinking that was how he’d be more masculine. “When I went to Starry Night in 2017 I saw these drag queens look like fucking superstars,” she says, the awe still present in her voice. “It's like Coachella. I call it Super Bowl energy. It's like the biggest drag stage to be on in Toronto. And I remember being like, wait. This is magical. This is art. This is entertainment. I can see myself doing this. What?!”

Her first performance was to “Freedom Dress” by Beyonce. “I looked like shit. My performance needed some work. But it didn't matter because it was like, oh, this makes sense for you.”

As Queen Priyanka puts it, that was when she started winning for the first time in her life. “I became a winner. I won pageants in Toronto. I did drag for seven months and all of a sudden I was the reigning queen of drag in all of Canada.”

She remembers one win in particular that meant a lot. She competed in Queen of Halloween. “This one was harder to win because it was a bunch of straight people that were on the judging panel because the sponsors would send their beer guys to judge this stupid drag pageant, you know what I mean?” she laughs. “And then when I won that, I was like. Wait. I can appeal to the queer community and I can impress a panel of these straight guys and still win? This is for me.”

It was that night that Queen Priyanka found her mission in life: to entertain people and make them smile and dance regardless of sexual orientation, gender, or nationality. She just wanted to bring joy, and she finally saw how – albeit in a very, very specific way.

“Drag has completely changed my life and made me realize my power,” she says. “But it also lets me help other people feel their power, too.”

But with her line of work, I’m still perplexed. Drag reminds me of watching olympic diving. As some guy whose skills are limited to belly flops and cannonballs, I’m in awe any time an olympian does seven hundred flips and lands face first in the water without making a splash. But then all the olympic judges give them a 7 out of 10 and I’m left feeling confused. How are they judging this thing?!

After explaining this to Queen Priyanka I ask, “So. Help me out here. From a technical perspective, what makes a good drag show? How do you judge it?”

She smiles and laughs. “This might be too hippie dippy, but honestly: if you watch a drag performance and you walk away feeling fearless after, that's what a good drag show is. Watching somebody put on a big-ass wig, tuck their dick inside of them with duct tape, wear hip pads and a full corset, a bodysuit with sparkles on it, and sell a fantasy and be funny and make you laugh and do all these amazing things? You walk away being like, ‘Yo! Shit! I guess I can do whatever I want because they go against everything that is normal.”

Lots of laughter. Lots of awe. Lots of singing. Lots of dancing. That’s what the social daredevil Queen Priyanka has been incorporating into her 21-date tour in support of her debut album DEVASTATIA, which drops August 23, 2024. Billed as a 70 minute, high energy pop music extravaganza, Queen Priyanka hopes the tour will satisfy fans of Doja Cat and BLACKPINK in equal measure.

DEVASTATIA marks a new era for Queen Priyanka: one in which she aims to show the world that she’s not a campy lip sync performer. She’s the whole package. She sings live. She dances furiously. And she’s ready to change the world. This is her way of laying it all on the line. Her lead single, “Shut It Down,” demonstrates the energy fans can expect from the album and the tour.

“When I think about my music project, it's like the only thing that I'm choosing to do,” she says seriously.

“I love music. I am a musician, I grew up around it. I love it, I love it, I love it.”

The show’s set design and costumes are also deeply meaningful to Queen Priyanka, and she hopes the narrative threads of the show touch the hearts of those in the audience. She says she wants to reclaim all the spaces in her life where she had a really tough time. You better believe Catholic school plaid and beer-drinking plaid will make some sort of appearance.

“I'm trying to bring real life stories on stage and tell these stories, but do it in a way where it feels like a musical – or putting on a good show with my music being the soundtrack.” Then, with a laugh, she says, “I’ve been doing cardio like Sia on the treadmill, buddy. Dance is so beautiful. Singing is so fun. Singing live and dancing is such a sport. It's crazy and it's hard, but I've been training so much over the past two years. It's crazy what you can achieve if you just want to go and do it.”

Lately, Queen Priyanka has been doing interviews in support of the HBO show We’re Here. She’s told the press boldly that one day she’ll be performing at the VMA’s. “I'm watching videos of myself saying that and thinking like, is this cringe? Or is this confident? Does it matter? Whatever it is, it's still me. I want people to be able to just live out loud.”

Then, referencing that formative experience of being called obnoxious, Queen Priyanka says: “Nowadays it’s no big deal that I have a personality like mine. It is what it is. I want to be a star. I want to entertain people. You could try to fight it, but it's going to happen.”

Tickets for Queen Priyanka’s Devastatia Tour are on sale now. You can stream her newest song, “GUCCIYANKA (FT. LEMON)” here.