Matt Rogers spills all the BTS tea on his guest appearance on 'Drag Race' season 16

Some hot tea has been spilled.

The long-standing interview segment with RuPaul’s Drag Race finalists had a different and exciting twist for season 16. As a part of their book branding challenge, top 4 queens Nymphia Wind, Plane Jane, Q, and Sapphira Cristál sat down for a podcast interview with multihyphenate legend Matt Rogers.

In case you didn’t know, Rogers cohosts the weekly Las Culturistas podcast with Bowen Yang. He’s also an actor (No Good Deed, I Love That for You, Fire Island), recording artist (Have You Heard of Christmas?), comedian, and writer. During this Drag Race episode, the semifinalists felt immediately at ease with Rogers, which yielded great conversations between them.

During the latest episode of Las Culturistas, Rogers shared some interesting tea about his time filming this episode of Drag Race and doing these interviews with the semifinalists. He also explained something that many fans had been wondering: did the queens write an entire book about their lives for this challenge? So, before further ado, let’s dive right into all the tea that’s been spilled!

Matt was invited to do the interviews one day before filming.

The tea-spilling between Rogers and Yang on Las Culturistas started with the call from Drag Race producers to invite him to film this segment.

“This is the BTS [behind-the-scenes] tea,” Rogers started. “Joel Kim Booster had guest-judged like a week and a half before me. And then I was literally recording my album in L.A. and they reached out, ‘Can Matt come? Like literally tomorrow’ to do something.”

Rogers first assumed that they were asking him to appear as a guest judge, which he recently did on All Stars 8 alongside Yang for the Snatch Game episode. However, producers made it clear that “it is not judging, it is something else,” teasing that it would be a “big part of the episode.”

After talking to Booster, Rogers figured out that there’d only be a few queens left in the season during the episode he would be featured in.

Here’s what Matt was given to prepare for the interviews (spoiler: it wasn’t entire books!)

“So I get there,” Rogers said, “and I’m essentially doing the Tic Tac lunch.”

Yang praised his friend and cohost for leading such an iconic Drag Race challenge and doing a fabulous job, and Rogers shared why he felt that things worked differently under the new format. “With Ru and Michelle [Visage], there’s a guard up, whereas I got immediately that they were talking to me like one of the girls. And literally, the prep… it was so funny. I get there, I go to my trailer, and there’s probably about 90 minutes to go before we tape. And they go, ‘Okay, here are their books, and here’s an info sheet about all of them. And I was like, ‘What? Their books?!”

When Yang asked Rogers what he was specifically given to read from the queens, this is what Rogers revealed: “So, they each wrote like two essays. The materials that they gave me, what I was surmising, was that they had to write two contrasting essays that said something about them. What it seemed like was: right a funny one and a more vulnerable one. It was all like that, except for Plane Jane, [whose essays] were both more comedy-forward.”

He then broke down how he felt about each of the top 4 queens.

“I will say: what you saw on TV was pretty much the way it felt in the room,” Rogers said. He then proceeded to break down his general impressions of the top 4 queens after filming those interviews with them. “Sapphira’s star-quality was, like, through the roof. She has so much gravitas. She so clearly knows herself, and I was so impressed with her.”

“Nymphia, I walked away, and the producers were literally like, ‘She’s never even used that tone of voice before. This was huge. Like, she never opens up,’” he explained. “She’s goofy, as we can see on the show. That’s kind of been true.”

Rogers went on, “Plane felt like one of our friends. It was just kind of, like, very normal. And then Q was great, but the fact that there’s the top 3 that there is, I’m not surprised. It had nothing really to do with Q… it just had to do with the three of them feeling like the three.”

Overall, Rogers expressed how happy he felt that this was a positive experience and that all of the queens came out looking good.

Matt also cleared up how his interaction with Plane Jane actually went.

As the conversation went on, Yang highlighted that the edit made it seem like Rogers “set a trap for Plane” during their interview. In response, Rogers said that he wanted to clear this up.

“There were no traps being set for Plane,” he explained. “I was having a lot of fun with Plane. We probably had the most casual conversation out of the four of us, because we had a lot of back and forth. Plane’s essay was called ‘Being a b*tch can be an act of kindness.’ So I asked a pretty simple question off that, which is: how have you ‘been a b*tch as an act of kindness’ in the competition? It’s not a trap if it was the name of her essay, you know what I mean?”

Rogers added, “I think that I had tons of positive things to say about my time with Plane, but the clip they showed was [me saying], ‘If an interviewer asks you to be shady, you don’t have to be shady,’ which is true. It’s something that everyone’s had to learn. Anyone that does any interviewing or pop culture discussion or talk about other people on a platform. There’s always gonna be the opportunity to say something uncouth. You just can’t take the opportunity all the time, which maybe is useful for Plane to learn.”

This Drag Race section of the episode ended with Rogers delivering an appropriately congenial statement: “We wish all top 3 queens the best as they head into the grand finale!”

You can listen to the latest episode of Las Culturistas below. RuPaul’s Drag Race season 16 airs every Friday on MTV.