Drag Race Casting Director Reveals She Actually Uses Reddit Dream Cast Lists to Make Decisions

Goloka Bolte is the most Emmy-nominated casting director for unscripted programming in television history. She's been nominated every year since the reality TV casting category was created in 2017, and won twice for her work on the drag queen reality competition RuPaul's Drag Race. She’s up for an Emmy again this year for her work on the show.

via: The Tab

Bolte just sat down on a podcast to reveal how she goes into making the decisions into who gets cast on the show – and she admits the team actually uses Reddit to help inform their choices. Honestly, iconic.

Goloka Bolte is officially the most Emmy award nominated casting director in history when it comes to reality TV – and has been nominated every single year since the category was created in 2017. She’s worked on all different kinds of shows, including the Real Housewives – but she says she’s most proud of her work casting RuPaul’s Drag Race. She just sat down with LAist on a podcast and revealed how the team go about picking what queens to audition for Drag Race from a casting director end.

Bolte says “Drag Race, I’m based in LA. I do try to take in drag shows as much as I can when I travel. But a lot of it is online. We look at all the different drag bars and places where they’re performing. We look at YouTube, you know the OG queens still got a lot of those great Facebook accounts going. We look at TikTok, we look at Instagram. Anywhere online.

“We look at Reddit, we see you guys. The Reddit threads for Drag Race are something else. Everyone is always sleuthing and everyone is figuring out who we’re going to cast. Everyone’s always putting out their dream list – I love those. Redditors, please keep sending those. We’re always looking through them. We’re basically just like stalking drag queens in whatever way we can and we’re getting recommendations. We’re going down the rabbit hole, looking at different drag families and who’s performing at different drag bars, who’s got a regular show.

“It’s a lot of searching because we want to make sure we get a lot of diversity. We have drag queens from around the country and we’re looking at all different types of drag, so we can’t just cast from one city.”

This is of course very validating for Reddit, who has such a dedicated community of Drag Race fans. Although most of them are now wondering why the hell Dida Ritz hasn’t been cast when she’s been on every single fan dream cast list since… the dawn of time.

The queens have to be multitalented — and yes, that includes knowing how to sew

Goloka Bolte: A queen needs to be able to do so much more than just slay a stage. A lot of people will see queens perform in their local bars and they're like, ‘Oh my God, she needs to be on the show.’ But you don't know if that queen can act, if she makes any of her costumes, if she can do characters, if she could do a Snatch Game, pick up choreography — all of it. And the queens that you see on the show have so much talent. So in this audition tape that we get from them we see their acting ability, we see their comedic chops, we see them do the lip syncs.

Antonia Cereijido: How important is the sewing aspect?

Goloka Bolte: I think that for any competition, the more well-rounded your skills are, the better. If you wanna be on Drag Race, you know, at some point there is going to be a sewing challenge. Get working on those glue gun skills!

The casting team watches thousands of submissions a year — in their PJs

Goloka Bolte:  We get thousands of submissions every year and we have a very small team, so we spend a lot of time poring over all of these applications, and then inevitably, the tapes all kind of come in at once. And I'm like… you've had eight weeks! Get the tape in before the deadline if it's ready. But I understand everybody wants to make it perfect. So our last week of casting we are just back to back, going through all of these tapes cross-eyed in our pajamas. I don't plan anything socially during that time. We've gotta buckle down because we're gonna watch every single one of them.

The show doesn’t cast for a villain

Goloka Bolte: We don't really ever cast for the villain. I'm never looking for a villain.

Antonia Cereijido: Really?

Goloka Bolte: Never. They cast themselves as the villain. I actually think because our message on the show really is overall about love, inclusivity, loving yourself, those beautiful workroom moments and all of that — I think when you get the villain arc, a lot of times it's a queen who had some growth [to do]. [She’s] not a true villain. It's a queen who had a growth story and it usually comes through and there's a great realization and lesson in it.

Social media following does not matter

Goloka Bolte:  We don't care about the following at all. I don't care if you have no followers at all. The one thing I would say is because we do so much of our scouting virtually, it helps if you at least have a social media page so that we can find you. If you wanna be on the show, make it easy for us to find you. But we're not doing any kind of calculation like, ‘Oh, this person has a big TikTok following, let's put them on the show.’ We really wanna find a person that is talented, has a story to tell, and is doing drag in like a fun, fresh, unique way.