Every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race starts off with a unique way to introduce the new season’s queens, and the first episode of season 17 needed to make an impact. Between director Nick Murray and production designer Jen Chu, creating a parody set of Squid Games with a giant doll for “Squirrel Games” certainly made that impact.
“It’s the opening of the new season of Drag Race, so it needed to have an impact visually, as well as creatively, you know, our normal Drag Race intros,” says Murray. “This is probably the biggest set that we have built on Drag Race in all of its 17 seasons. And I was just super excited on how I’m going to shoot this to make it look real in Drag Race, and have it stand up to the two references.”
“The whole scale of it is something we don’t do every day,” says Chu. “We have a finite amount of space on our stages, and when somebody is like, ‘Oh we’re going to host 40 plus drag queens, and we’re going to throw pies at them and we want to see all of them on camera at the same time…’ Even though the set is very simple, it is quite complicated logistically, artistically and directorially.”
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The set itself looked simplistic, but Chu and Murray say there were many complicated factors to consider. “We’re just putting up four walls of white drapes, but we need to light those four walls, we need to dress around the bottom of the edges of the four walls,” says Murray. In addition to the lights and dressing, props like hay bales and cow hides were added to fill out the scene, as well as carpet to make sure the queens didn’t slip on the pies. “Compared to other challenges, everything just comes in bigger and requiring more stuff.”
For the actual doll of Lil’ Poundcake, Chu had to reach out to a professional puppet maker to help. “We have some brilliant prop makers on our show, but they specialize in woodworking and scenery,” says Chu. “Teasing extra-large wigs is not necessarily for everybody, so we had to reach out to some people who are more accustomed with the materials.”
The contestants in the Squid Games series were shot when they lost in the challenge, so Murray, Chu and the producers had to come up with a way to simulate that in a safe, and comical, way. “I remember at first we were going to do glitter bombs, and we had a whole big meeting about the complexities of how on earth we were going to do that,” says Murray.
“I think they wanted to come up with an impactful mechanism to eliminate the queens,” says Chu. “Obviously, it’s drag so glitter is always on the table, literally and figuratively.”
Unfortunately, the glitter bombs would have damaged the costumes that each drag queen brought to wear, so the producers opted for pies being thrown instead. “I remember out prop master, Virgil [Orap], was in the room off to the side of the challenge stage, just prepping pie crust after pie crust full of whipped cream for hours and hours.”
“I remember going to the pie testing because not all pies are made the same,” says Murray. “There was rounds of making different pies with different crusts, how much foam was in there… but it was how the crust collapsed on the face at first that was tricky.”
“Many a challenge producer got slammed in the face with a pie, repeatedly, just to make this TV moment,” says Chu.
Click the video above to watch the full discussion.