There are drag queens, and then there’s Jinkx Monsoon — the only person in history to win RuPaul’s Drag Race twice, a primetime Doctor Who villain, a Broadway standout, and, as of this year, a West End leading lady playing Mary Todd Lincoln. If you’ve somehow missed her this decade, that’s a you problem, and we’re here to fix it.
From Portland, With Attitude
Born Jerick Hoffer in Portland, Oregon, in 1987, Jinkx was doing musical theater before most of us had figured out long division. She trained at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts and spent years paying her dues in fringe theater — the kind of scrappy, sweaty, cash-only work that either builds a performer or breaks one. It built one. The signature catchphrase, “water off a duck’s back,” isn’t a bit; it’s a survival strategy with excellent comic timing.
The Two-Time Champion
Season 5 of Drag Race (2013) introduced America to a queen with no gowns, no pageant polish, and no interest in either — just comedic instincts sharp enough to draw blood. Her Snatch Game as Little Edie Beale remains the performance every drag queen since has been quietly measured against. Then in 2022, on All Stars 7 — the all-winners season, the hardest room in drag — she won again. First and only two-time champion. The show has anointed exactly one GOAT, and she drinks Russian dressing out of a shoe.
Maestro, Darling
Then television noticed. In 2024’s Doctor Who episode “The Devil’s Chord,” Jinkx sauntered onto the BBC and Disney’s flagship as Maestro — a glam, grandiose, music-devouring demon opposite Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor — and promptly did what villains on that show rarely do: stole it. Critics raved. Fans made her a GIF within the hour. The lesson nobody at the BBC seemed to learn: drag training IS villain training. The camp, the menace, the entrance — a queen who has done death drops in front of drunk bachelorette parties fears nothing the Whoniverse can throw at her.
Broadway, the West End, and Mrs. Lincoln
Not content with conquering drag and television, Jinkx made her Broadway debut as Matron “Mama” Morton in Chicago — a role she wrapped so well that PEOPLE ranked her among 2025’s best Broadway performances. And this year, she crossed the Atlantic: her West End debut, in the lead role of Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! — the absurdist farce in which Mary Todd Lincoln is a cabaret-starved, memory-haunted, delightfully unhinged leading lady. Let’s recap: the two-time Drag Race champion is now headlining London as the First Lady of the United States. The pitch meeting for that sentence alone deserves an award.
The Verdict
Nonbinary, unbothered, and unmatchable, Jinkx Monsoon is the strongest argument yet that drag isn’t a detour into entertainment — it’s the whole roadmap. Sketch comedy, theater, television, music: she’s done it all without sanding down a single edge, which in this industry is rarer than a second Drag Race crown. She turns 39 this September 18, and she’ll probably spend the birthday working, because of course she will. Water off a duck’s back — and everything else straight into the history books.
