‘Drag Race’ Files: What Happened To Santino Rice?

By Bianca Guzzo

Now that another season of RuPaul’s Drag Race has wrapped, let’s look back at someone who for many is a piece of Drag Race lore: Santino Rice. During the first six seasons of the show, Rice had a permanent seat on the judging panel, and many fans of the show consider him to be integral to the foundations of the franchise. Others, however, remember him for his divisive critiques of the queens regarding their fashion choices on the main stage. For the past decade, aside from an appearance as a guest judge in the show’s seventh season, Rice has kept out of the spotlight and the Drag Race cinematic universe. So, although he is now nothing but a memory from the first few seasons (and sometimes a punchline to a quick joke on the series), we feel the need to ask: what ever happened to Santino Rice?

How it started

After attending fashion school in Los Angeles, Rice worked in film and television before becoming a contestant on the second season of Project Runway, where he won a couple of challenges, but overall, produced only enough winning looks to finish the competition in third place. He was remembered as being the villain of his season due to his sharp and sometimes harsh delivery. After Project Runway, Rice served as a judge for the Miss Universe pageant in 2006 and continued to design clothing before joining the judging panel on a new show called RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2009.

As a judge on Drag Race, Santino’s critiques of the queens’ fashion choices during the runway segment of each episode were just as well received as he had been during his time on Project Runway. As in, not too well received. While fans agreed that he had some valid points to make about what the queens had chosen for their runway walk, many also thought that he would go against the consensus of the other judges just for the hell of it. 

Rice served as a main judge from the show’s inception through to the end of the sixth season. According to screenrant.com, by that point, the show was becoming less about fashion and more about drag as an art form. And, although Rice could argue at length about fashion and fabrics, he wasn’t as well versed in all things drag. It’s highly speculated that he and the Drag Race family parted ways as new judges were brought on board to usher in a new era of the series, an era in which it eventually became the cultural phenomenon of today—though it’s important to note that no reps from either Rice or the show have ever verified the reason for his departure from the series.

Tammie Brown, a Season 1 queen, was asked about the Drag Race judges during an interview on the YouTube Drag Queen Interviews with Matt  in February 2023, and she claimed that contestants got Rice fired after too many harsh critiques on the runway. Referring to all of the Season 1 judges, Tammie said, “You know…how can you talk to us like this?” She continued, “You have Santino up here saying these rude things to us. Who the hell is he anyways? In fact, we got him fired is what happened.” She went on to say that once the queens started talking among themselves about the mistreatment they felt coming from the judges, Rice began to feel threatened, and three years later, he was let go from the series. “It was awful. It was like, how dare you talk to us like this?” she said. 

In May 2023 on the same YouTube series, Season 2 queen Pandora Boxx called Rice “an asshole,” and said his critiques of her looks were mean without any constructive or helpful information. “He was terrible and he made me feel horrible and did not relent. Maybe said a couple of nice things but, yeah, I’m glad he’s not a judge anymore,” she said.

Rice’s alt-right persona

Rice’s final appearance on Drag Race was as a guest judge in Season 7. He is still living and working in Hollywood, but since his time on Drag Race, the attention he’s gained from fans of the show and the general public hasn’t exactly been favourable.

Since then, he’s appeared in an episode of the daytime television talk show The Doctors in 2017, where he talked about his controversial 111-day juice fast. While some supported his endeavour to strengthen his immune system by surviving off liquids for prolonged periods of time, others argued that it promoted unsafe disordered eating. On the show, Rice (who was then on day 109 of his fast) claimed that he had never felt better or more energized. He also stated that his original reason for starting this diet was to combat symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and celiac disease without taking doctor-prescribed medications that he “didn’t want to sign up for.” One of the hosts jokingly suggested that the reason he was having symptom flare-ups prior to the juice fast was because his diet wasn’t as balanced as he claimed it was.

Reddit is filled with fan theories and tea—some factual and some speculative—on the former Drag Race judge. One fan posted a conspiracy theory as a joke in 2019 that Season 8 queen Acid Betty was actually Santino Rice in drag. Others have started threads on the site discussing whether Rice was the most sensitive (or insensitive) judge who has ever been on the Drag Race panel. He is universally disliked by fans on the show, who constantly find new ways to talk on social media and online forums about all of the ways they despise him. 

Rice is still fairly active on X (formerly Twitter) despite being temporarily suspended from the site in 2022. He still tweets regularly, mostly about his personal health views and distrust of the current American government, which really ramped up during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. 

Doing a deep scroll through Rice’s tweets may leave you scratching your head. It’s a mix of his personal takes on health, videos of U.S. President Donald Trump, anti-vaccine rhetoric, and links to controversial media (such as a link to a Jordan Peterson podcast). It’s all a stark contrast from the content we’re used to seeing from others in the Drag Race family. Instead of messages of togetherness and unity, Rice spends the majority of his time online using buzzwords and phrases popular with the alt-right.

Since his time on the show, Drag Race has certainly gone through a rebrand (which some fans attribute to a theory that RuPaul likes to shake things up every seven years or so). Rice has long since been replaced by judges Ross Matthews and Carson Kressley, who provide the current queens with valid critiques that are also constructive and uplifting. 

Whether you love Santino Rice, or love to hate him, he will forever be intertwined with the humble beginnings of the Drag Race franchise, and for his professional critiques and spats with the first queens—which ultimately made the show what it is today.