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

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.”

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.