Welcome back to It Pays the Bills! Today’s guest is George Lester. From folding clothes at Primark to publishing a book during the pandemic to his award-winning drag act, That Girl, George has had a wealth of experience in and out of creative industries.
A bit about George:
George Lester is the author of award nominated YA novel Boy Queen, an actor and drag queen based in London. When he’s not living in a world of words, he’s living his best life in the biggest wig imaginable as drag queen That Girl. In 2023, following protests from the far right at a Drag Storytime event, That Girl was named Pink News Drag Artist of the Year 2023 for her community work and went on to write and star in multi-award nominated show, THAT GIRL VS THE WORLD, which premiered at The Bridge House Theatre in 2024. He lives in Twickenham with his partner, is obsessed with romcoms of all kinds (gloriously classic to deliciously trashy), and, if pushed, would probably say that they were on a break but Ross still shouldn’t have done what he did.
George’s Instagram | That Girl’s Instagram | Boy Queen | See That Girl Live!
In the condensed transcript below, I’ve italicized my questions and comments. Paid subscribers will receive a bonus edition next week, Perks of the Job. Enjoy!
What are your projects? What's your creative pursuit?
So I do a lot of things. I'm a drag queen. I am an author. I'm also an editor of other people's work. And a lot less now than I thought would be, I’m also an actor. So it's sort of anything that means I don't have to go to an office. So pretty much, if it means that I can go somewhere and do fun things, then let's do that.
And how did you get into it, how did it all begin for you?
So, I mean, I've always loved performing, like, from a young age and was one of those very annoying kids who puts on shows for the adults. I suppose it started there and then it kind of carried on through school. And my undergraduate degree was in drama with creative writing. So I sort of was following both of my pursuits at once.
I got a job in publishing. So I used to work in children's publishing; I worked at Penguin for a very short time and then worked at Pan Macmillan for three years. And it was while I was there that I realised how much I missed performing and started doing amdram. People used to say lovely things about me in amdram and being the self-deprecating person that I am, I was like well they're just being nice.
Then it was a director who I'd worked with on Sister Act. And then he came to see me do Legally Blonde. He was like, why are you not doing this? And so it was that moment of like, okay, so maybe we need to stop thinking that people are being nice and try something.
So I did an evening course at ArtsEd while I was still working in publishing, and then got onto a master's program at Mountview, which is then where the drag came from, because that was part of the creative project. Like, my means to an end, let's get a master's degree by doing a creative project, and suddenly she's become, like, my entire life, which is crazy.
There is a joke in my essay for my creative project. I said something to the effect of, watch as she becomes more famous than me. And she has done exactly that. Like, more people know me as That Girl than they do as George, for sure.
And then you've gone from strength to strength with That Girl. I mean, That Girl rules the world!
She really... She's getting there, isn't she? Like, you can't stop her.
It's really interesting because, like, the creative project, when I finished it, I'd had such a lovely time performing in drag that I always said I want to keep doing this. This will be something I do on the side because when you're doing your master's programme and you're kind of coming out of it and you're thinking, I'm now going to go and be a West End star.
But yeah, I always wanted to keep doing it. And then obviously the pandemic happened. I'd started in a drag competition, before the pandemic, which obviously got cancelled because everything closed. And I think, I don't know, when you're locked inside, the only thing you can really do is paint your face.
So I did a lot of that and one of the first jobs that I got - actually, it was the first job that I got out after in 2021 after the world sort of opened up again was panto at the Bridge House Theatre in Penge. It was their first panto and I was their dame. And she sort of spiraled from there, really.
What would you consider to be your current day job?
So my current day job is probably the editorial stuff more than anything else. It's interesting because I'm absolutely doing enough drag for it to be my full-time job.
But I think there is that small part of my brain that doesn't want to commit to it because I think I see a lot of drag artists and I see a lot of performers in general who - their creative pursuit becomes their vocation and becomes their job and suddenly it becomes less fun. And I think I sort of came to that conclusion last year where I was very very busy and I was talking to one of my drag sisters her name is Charcuterie - she's fabulous, we talk all the time and I was talking about she was like you're full-time now right? And I was like, well no because I'm still doing like my editorial day job. And she said, okay, so why are you saying yes to these gigs that you don't want to do? And I was like, that's entirely fair.
Because it's one thing to do a gig as like a means to an end. But like if I don't need to do this gig that sounds awful or doesn't pay enough, then I don't have to do it because my money is coming from elsewhere.
So like it very much varies because the editorial stuff I sort of pick up and put down, which is both a positive and a negative.
What do you sit down and do [as an editor]?
So I'll read a piece of work. And essentially, I say this to people all the time, and I feel like it completely demystifies the editing process: you have to go in there with a strong opinion and say it with conviction.
So I'll go into it and I'll read it and we'll do like top line stuff first. So I'll read the entire thing. And normally it would be like a couple of pages that I've written out of like, so here's the big picture things that we need to work on. And then they'll do that work. It'll come back to me again. And then we'll do it line by line and I'll kind of go through and I'll be really making notes on what's going on.
It's so much fun getting to work with someone in that way because it just feels constantly creative. I loved getting my own book edited. That was always really fun because it was nice to have someone else's input on things.
Two really good examples of that kind of culmination of everything that gets put together for you is you wrote and published a book. And you also recently put on a one-woman show. Both of those kind of fuse everything that you kind of do together, don't they?
Oh God, absolutely. So the book came about because after we finished at Mountview and I'd started doing drag and I was painting my face a lot just during the summer, just because I could. I got a message from, her name is Rachel Petty, she used to be my line manager at Macmillan. So she messaged me and she said, you started doing drag; I want a book about a teenage boy who wants to be a drag queen, I think you should write it. And I was like, okay! So I wrote a sample and a synopsis, sent it over to her. She sent me back some notes. I rewrote it and sent it back to her again. And they bought it.
And so that came out in the pandemic, which was devastating because it was one of those things where it was like, oh gosh, they planned all of these events and all these things we were going to do. And suddenly all of that went away. So it was just this weird thing of like, okay, so we're trying to get momentum for this book.
And then with the one-woman show it was based on my creative project which was made at Mountview in 2019. So I performed it at the Bridge House Theater in 2022, like a one-nighter thing just to kind of see how that felt. And it was only after my incredibly dramatic 2023 that I was approached by Simon Jeal, who is a Labour counsellor for Penge, who is a big supporter of the theatre and a patron of the theatre, who said, I think there's a show in what happened to you and I want to fund it. So I got together with Luke Adamson, who runs the Bridge House Theatre, who cast me in the panto. I wrote it - the first half was kind of based on the creative project, the second half was all brand new, then we got together and we sort of went through it all together and collaborated and sort of made it better and added things in and took some things out.
And I remember at Mountview, they constantly talked about being in the right place at the right time. And I don't think I ever really knew what that meant. And it was only in like maybe the last six months that I've been like, it's not about being in the right place at the right time. It's just about keeping on showing up. You just have to keep being there because eventually it is the right time. You just have to keep showing up. Even when you don't want to show up, even when it's hard and you're tired or you're like having major like self-doubt moments, you just have to keep on knocking on those doors. Eventually, so long as you're still there and you're still open to it, it should come to you.
Have you had any other previous day jobs?
I've not had massive amounts of day jobs because I was a bookseller for a long time. Publishing was very up and down. I worked at Primark for a time. In the pandemic, when things got bleak and things were starting to open again, I needed a job. So I was a shop assistant in Primark for a little while which was very strange, because I'd not done retail work for such a long time. I mean, it was not my favorite job. They were really nice to me there. And I think they were nice to me because you could treat the entire thing like an acting exercise because no, you do not care about these clothes. However, I will act like I do.
And I'm always of a mind that like, whenever I was in customer service-y jobs, I'm very much a service with a smile kind of person. And so I would always be like, happy smiley with the customers when I’m on the till or whatever because it doesn't serve me to be miserable while i'm there, I need to make the best of it. So I am gonna crack jokes with you, I am gonna do my tight 10 while I’m scanning your clothes. We're going to test out the material while I scan through this suitcase that you're buying.
Do you have any advice for anybody looking to go into a creative industry?
Don't. (Laughs) No.
It's gonna be hard. It's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna go the way you think it's gonna go. And you actually have to find the beauty in that rather than seeing that as a struggle. Because I think the best things that have happened to me within my creative pursuits have been unexpected things.
And I think that's what's so cool about a creative industry is that if you're just open to whatever's out there, who knows what you're going to do next. If I told myself 10 years ago, like all of these things that were going to happen. I mean, the first thing I'd say is pandemic?? And then I’d be like, wait, drag??
Find positivity anywhere you can, expect the unexpected, and be open to whatever is out there. Because you never know what's going to be just around the corner waiting for you.
Do you have a creative dream?
Yeah, I think that's the weird thing is that like, I don't know what's next. And I think that's kind of exciting and a bit cool. I want to get another book deal. I want another book out because I feel like I didn't get to do it the first time. That is something that is almost entirely out of my control because all I can do is write the book and hopefully find a new agent who is as passionate about it as I am and who thinks that they can sell it, whatever that book may be. That's kind of the main one at the front of my head.
Do you have a dream day job?
God, dream day job. I've always wanted to write for TV. I've always wanted to write a multi-camera sitcom. And like, I used to write scripts all the time. I wrote an entire 24 episode teen drama series when I was like 15, 16.
Maybe that's what it is. Maybe Boy Queen needs to be turned into a TV series. And then just cast all of my friends.
I think that's exactly what you should do!
Right, well, so I'll be back on this podcast in a year's time to tell you how that went.
We're putting it in the diary!
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