‘A movie for everyone, not just Drag Race fans’: stars of drag comedy Stop! That! Train! on making the summer’s funniest film

Director Adam Shankman and drag queen actors explain putting a brilliantly madcap twist on Airplane! style parody

D rag queens are never more striking than when they’re set against an everyday background. “Kristen Stewart is a buoy … ” the Laotian American beauty Jujubee muttered spacily to herself in the hallway of Bleecker Street Media’s New York office, reading out the tag-line of a framed poster for the 2024 sci-fi/romance Love Me . The former RuPaul ’s Drag Race contestant and star of the new disaster-comedy Stop! That! Train! was lingering outside an office cubicle in a structured blazer and fishnets as an attentive PR took her order for lunch. By that point she’d been in full wardrobe and make-up all day fielding press, including a mid-morning stop with her castmates at NBC’s Today with Jenna & Sheinelle.

I’d heard Jujubee and her co-star Ginger Minj before I saw them, laughing like glamorous hyenas from another room. When they made an entrance, they did so in coordinated cheetah print looks, greeting me with the kind of mega-watt smiles that told me I was now their audience. I was impressed by how “on” they were, but could imagine it was taxing to keep up. How had the whirlwind of press been for them? “It’s been a lot of work but it doesn’t feel like it,” Ginger admitted. “The tour has absolutely mimicked the making of the movie.” “We have to schedule our sleep,” Jujubee added as she slowly began to peel off some cumbersome press-on nails. “But I’m so high on life and all of us have been able to stay in the moment, and live in this stormaganza of press.” They immediately started cackling again.

Stop! That! Train! is set in a parallel America where railways are the dominant mode of transportation, “stormaganzas” are recognized (if infrequent) extreme weather events, and seemingly everyone is an amoral maniac dedicated to acting out on their worst behavior. Even if you don’t believe that the premise of “RuPaul as president of the United States” should be played for laughs, the drag queen-fronted comedy by Adam Shankman develops such an infectious, full-throated strain of humor that it’s very hard not to succumb to its charm. The movie works in the same tradition of satire as The Naked Gun , Scary Movie , and Airplane! , where conventional logic matters less than sustained world-building and rapid-fire joke-telling. It’s a format that lends itself uniquely well to RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality show that dedicates whole episodes to extended parody and where glamour and spoof coexist together on the cellular level.

The film follows Tess (Ginger) and DeeDee (Jujubee) who become stewardesses on luxury train line, Glamazonian, after they’re suddenly laid off from Stank Rail. Natural disaster, presidential politics, musical numbers, paranormal activity and Sarah Michelle Gellar ensue. The screenplay by Christina Friel and Connor Wright is incredibly busy, clocking an astonishing rate of gags per minute that only becomes fully clear after multiple watches. Even if not all of the punchlines land, the constantly zipping dialogue means that you don’t have to wait long until the next massive one-liner. The extended gag of legendary queen Latrice Royale taking on every job in America, the call-and-response hilarity of “give it to me straight/now give it to me gay” and the blink-or-miss-it randomness of Raven-Symoné playing a character called “Shayna Gefilte-Manischewitz” are woven together like comic kevlar.

Despite how mainstream and award-winning Drag Race is, and how well-received auxiliary shows like AJ and the Queen and We’re Here have been, Stop! That! Train! still feels like a major crossover event for the franchise. It is a vehicle that’s pointedly aimed at a much wider public rather than their established cult audience. “I was very clear with [the producers] that I was making a movie for everyone, not just Drag Race fans,” Shankman clarified. “This movie doesn’t exist without Drag Race but you could say that about the off-shoots of characters from Saturday Night Live: they’re their own thing, and we’re our own thing.”

After guest judging on Drag Race, Shankman was presented with a script by producer Randy Barbato and asked if he could take a look at it. In its original form, the script featured one radical difference: it was going to be set onboard a plane. “I already have a target on my back,” Shankman remembered thinking to himself: ”I don’t want to remake Airplane!” Instead he suggested it be set on a train, transplanting the same sense of life-or-death urgency to one of the most boring and dependable forms of civilian transit. Thus unexpected turbulence, falling oxygen masks, and the threat of crash landings loom large in the background. As President Judy Gagwell, RuPaul plays a battle-tested member of the US army’s now-shuttered Rail Force Division, haunted by the young girl’s life she couldn’t save in a series of extended “hot flashbacks”.

In the lore of Drag Race, “Glamazonian” is a company that’s rivaled only by Acme in terms of comic corporate malfeasance. Thus the job of “rail stewardess” means aiding and abetting the bad behavior of their wealthy clientele. As the train departs the station, the bitchy, glamorous trio of first class attendants (played by Brooke Lynn Hytes, Marty Lauter and Symoné), even perform a musical number encouraging users to get their drugs out since they aren’t subject to TSA.