Heidi N Closet made her reality TV debut on season 12 of RuPaul's Drag Race, where she was ultimately crowned Miss Congeniality. In 2023, she returned to the competition for All Stars 8and was immediately deemed one of the frontrunners to snatch the crown.
Unfortunately, after a series of diverging perspectives with costars like Kandy Muse, Kahanna Montrese, and Alexis Michelle, Heidi chose to quit All Stars 8 in the Snatch Game episode. Many fans were incredibly upset by her walking out of the werk room, but remained supportive that Heidi had to do what was best for her mental health.
During a brand-new interview for the Exposed With Joseph Shepherd series, Heidi didn't shy away from spilling some major tea about season 12 and All Stars 8 – and we love to see it!
Scroll through for some of the highlights of Heidi N Closet's interview on Exposed With Joseph Shepherd – which airs every Thursday on OUTtv.
Paramount+
"Kandy kept poking at me and kept trying to bring up. Me and Kandy had our own conversation off the TV and stuff. When we talked, she was like, 'You told the girls what I said?' 'You told Jimbo what I said?' I was like, 'Well it's the same thing that you did to me when you told Kahanna what I said.'"
"If you go back and watch the Untucked where I'm talking about leaving for the first time, look at the wide shot. Everyone else around us is talking to each other. It's just me and Kandy talking to each other. They had to blow that audio up so you could hear it, because I was whispering to Kandy in that instance. But what they don't show is that Kandy tries to get me to go over to the side and talk about it. And I was like, 'I don't wanna talk about it right now.' So instead of just leaving it, she grabs Kahanna, goes across the room, and tells Kahanna everything I just said on camera. And that's how the producers knew I wanted to quit."
"And then she's told me, 'The producers were the ones that kept having me do that to you.' I was like, 'Well, you told them no to the final lip sync song against Jimbo, why didn't you tell them no then? Because you could've.' I told them 'no' all the time."
Before walking out of the All Stars 8 werk room for good, Heidi claims that she came back and actually talked to the other queens on set. "I came back in and had a whole conversation with the girls before I left," she explained. "If you watch the whole thing, like, we start with no makeup on. I start with a little bit of makeup on, and then at the end, I have like no makeup on. Whereas, the other girls, they start with almost no makeup on, and by the end of it they have fully mugged on. So, it's like, you could tell there's been a time lapse."
"Honestly, I wish the other girls would've walked out right behind me too because they wanted to just as bad. As you saw, Kahanna wanted to leave two weeks later. And honestly, a lot of the other girls wanted to leave that same day. Most of them, actually. All but two. (…) It was Jimbo and Jessica, they didn't wanna go. Everyone else wanted to quit."
VH1
"At first, when things were happening, I would stay in contact with her via text. I had just spent the whole summer with her, and for me personally, she was always kind to me. She was always sweet to me. She even, for the makeover challenge, she lent me the outfit that my makeover girl wore. She lent me that outfit because I didn't have anything that would fit Nicole. We were actually supposed to have a disco runway that ended up not being used. So, I used my disco runway, and then Sherry's disco runway."
VH1
"Even though what she did was horrible, and I do stand with the victims, I don't want anyone to harm themselves. And going through that… see, so the New York girls on our season, they were very much like, 'Throw her to the wolves. I don't want anything to do with her,' I was like, 'I get that y'all don't wanna be like publicly with her or anything, but y'all were up under her ass the whole time while we were filming that. That was y'all's home girl, allegedly. But now that she's done wrong, y'all just throw her the wolves. I get that y'all don't wanna be with her, but as a person, as a human being, she is a human being. And going through this alone is dark. She could end up harming herself.' I know I personally would've never forgave myself if she had committed suicide or something during that entire time. So, I would stay in contact. Not a lot, because it was still just a hard situation to maneuver."
Shepherd then asked Heidi if she believed that the re-editing of Drag Race season 12 (done to erase Sherry's presence as much as possible) had any impact on how she was perceived on the show. "I think [the edit] would've been less me. What I fully think is that Sherry was gonna win our season. I think if she wasn't gonna win, it was gonna be Gigi [Goode]. I think Jaida [Essence Hall] wholeheartedly deserves it. I think Jaida has been a phenomenal representative and is sickening. I love that b*tch. That's my homie. That's who I wanted to win."
"But when we were there, we could feel it. You can see it. You feel the energy, feel the vibe. The whole season it was, 'We love these two, we love these two.' It was always gonna be those two. And it just didn't pan out that way. But she was very talented. She was. I think people would've loved Sherry Pie."
Rumor has it that the cast of Drag Race season 12 did film a reading challenge, but it was so bad that it did not air on television. Thankfully, Shepherd was ready to ask Heidi to clear up those rumors, and the real story is crazier than we thought. "You know what, it wasn't great. But what I will say is… Canada vs the World's reading challenge." Do you remember that one? That one was horrible. But we did ours and the producers came in right after we finished. They were like, 'Yeah, we can't use any of that.'"
"The thing is, we weren't originally supposed to have a reading challenge. They had us do the [FabFitFun] box thing where they had written all the jokes down for us. We were supposed to just read them off and, like, read each other. So that was supposed to be our reading challenge. We were like, 'Do we get a regular reading challenge?' They were like 'no' for the longest [time]. But when we got down to it, they were like, 'Okay.' I guess they wanted to feel space or something, I don't know. They had made it clear that we weren't going to read, but then kind of like, 'Okay, let's do it then.' And it was pretty bad."
"Sherry went down the line and complimented everyone. Like, she didn't read no one, she just would just give everyone a compliment. I'm like, 'She's playing by her own rules, which she does.' I think by that point, all the people that most of the girls were going to read had already went home because I think it was like [the] top six of us. It was only like a couple of us left. We all got along too. Season 12, we call it the 'best friend race' because this is what it was. We didn't really have like sharp reads for each other."
