How Onya Nurve’s Midwestern Roots Fueled Her Drag Race Victory
‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ season 17 winner Onya Nurve sat down with GO to chat about her well-deserved win and what’s coming next.
Even out of drag and dressed in black, Onya Nurve beams through the grainy pixels of our Zoom call like sequins under a glittering spotlight. Her signature wit and warmth land just as sharply in webcam lighting as they do under the glow of the Drag Race stage. I can instantly see why Drag Race season 17 viewers flocked to her Instagram over the course of the show, making her the first queen in Drag Race her-story to garner 300,000 likes on her final team Instagram post, the most popular queen on social media this season.
Before we spoke, I found myself reflecting on the nature of the Ohio drag scene that Onya called home before RuPaul called. Long before she first stepped into the Werk Room, Onya came from a place I know to be a state of contradictions, from its underground punk scenes to its soybean fields, to its pageant queens and basketball jocks. Comedian Stephen Colbert once jokingly asked Senator John Glenn what it was about our state that makes people want to flee the earth, and there is something to be said for turning to drag to do just that: to skyrocket past the expected and into the stratosphere, as Onya did.
Onya Nurve is a product of that duality. She cut her teeth in local theater productions of Shrek—she’s played Donkey several times, which must be a delight to anyone who watched her snatch the win from the Snatch Game as Eddie Murphy (more on that in a second!). She sharpened her speaking skills on her high school’s Speech and Debate Team. That same self-described “dazzling uniqueness and verve” we saw on our screens was forged in Cleveland community theaters and school auditoriums, before the Drag Race cameras trained their focus on her radiance.
And she was radiant. From her first win during the talent competition to taking the crown home after the final lip sync, Onya Nurve became known for charisma, a force so strong it’s difficult to define other than to use that word. It comes from a place of joy.
Drag Race’s Snatch Game challenge, a Match Game parody where queens take on celebrity personas as they play with special guests, is a particular point of pride for competing queens. It’s repeated every year, and sometimes, participating queens seem to care just as much about being the winner of the Snatch Game as they do being the winner of Drag Race itself. It’s an immense amount of pressure, but when Onya performed as Eddie Murphy, she did it with infectious joy that was quickly picked up by the queens around her, becoming one of the driving forces behind why this year’s Snatch Game was one for the ages.
“I think I just had a knack for his -isms,” she tells GO with a laugh, referring to the idiosyncratic Murphy, whose mannerisms she mimicked with perfect grace. “And I think what I truly brought to it was just having fun and being able to laugh at myself. I think that was what I was the most successful at.”
And, of course, prior theater experience playing the role of Donkey in Shrek brought her special insight to the challenge of portraying Murphy, whose movies were part of her childhood. Whether Onya was on the small stage in a donkey costume or on the biggest drag stage in the world, she tells GO that she has always had the support of her father. Drag Race fans saw a glimpse of this unwavering support during season 17’s Makeover Challenge, where loved ones were brought to the werkroom and turned into a drag queen by their queen. If you say you didn’t shed a tear when Onya’s dad walked into the room, you’re lying.
“I think that was one of the most emotional moments of my life,” Onya says. “There was an extra level of emotion because my dad has always supported me, but I didn’t know he supported me enough to get on the stage and do drag. It was a very big moment for not only me to see, but for Black parents to see around the world.”
Being from Northeast Ohio myself, I know how ingrained the traditional understanding of masculinity is within Midwestern culture. For lack of a better phrase, it’s a region where men are expected to “be men,” whatever that means. There are expectations placed on Ohio’s sons by their fathers, at least broadly speaking, to be “strong,” and in this context, “strong” usually means shutting off one’s emotions. We got a glimpse of Onya’s dad’s emotions during the finale when he let a few tears roll, making it clear that he’s her number one fan.
I turned our attention to the lip sync finale, where Onya faced off against Jewels Sparkles to the pounding beat of Lady Gaga’s “Abacadabra.” Onya worked her magic as the Lady in Red and was the rare queen who won Drag Race without a big twist or reveal in her final performance.
“I feel like before getting on Drag Race, I’m not a queen of reveals, gags, and goops,” Onya says. “Why do a reveal when you don’t do them normally? And I feel like a part of the lip sync is showing your true performance style.”
That doesn’t mean she didn’t consider a big twist, though. “Another part of me [wanted] to do it. I actually did practice a gag and a goop, but to be completely transparent, I didn’t practice them with nails. I didn’t want to mess up the gag because I feel like messing up a gag is worse than not doing one. And so I took a gamble. I’m either going to be proud of my performance and not win, or I’m going to be proud of my performance and win. And I was proud of my performance, and I won.”
It made for a controversial win for Onya. Some fans were delighted that she let her work speak for itself, while others argued that her opponent, Jewel Sparkles, put on the better show. But by and large, social media has been supportive of Onya and quick to rush to her defense.
“So I was the first queen to not do a reveal in, I feel like, eight seasons, who won. And it was a good reminder to all entertainers that you don’t even necessarily have to do a split to win a Drag Race competition.
In the end, she didn’t need it. Onya strutted across that stage and into the halls of Drag Race royalty with her usual confidence and grace, no gag or goop needed.
All those eyes and spotlights on one girl from Ohio—and she’s flourishing from the attention. When they look at her, Onya says, “I hope that they see a badass Black queen that is unapologetic, and I hope that any artist, any drag queen, any entertainer that looks just like me know that dreams do come true.”
The world is Onya’s oyster, and she’s only looking up. She grinned when I told her that I’d heard she was gunning for an EGOT next, with an emphasis on Broadway, and I couldn’t let her get away without asking what her dream roles were. She brought up Kinky Boots‘s Lola before turning her attention to shows she was dying to see back on Broadway: she would take “any role” in Ragtime, and says that RENT is due for a comeback.
The role of Angel is the role she wants: Angel Dumat Schunard, who does away with a rich yuppie landlord’s dog for a paycheck, and finds her joy in the people around her and the love she has for them. I think we’d all agree the performance would have theater audiences cheering and sobbing through both acts.
Most of all, though? She laughed, purposefully braying like Murphy’s Donkey: “I think the world deserves to see me do Shrek.”
Let’s hope casting directors are keeping their ears open. With a crown on her head, a battalion of theater credits to her name, and nothing but upward potential, Onya Nurve is shooting for the stars.
