All aboard the Glamazonian Express! STOP! THAT! TRAIN! Delivers the funny with its wacky, campy, and unashamedly silly farce. The film from Adam Shankman (The Prom, Hairspray) features an adventure stacked with a who’s who of Drag Race royalty. In the grand tradition of Drag Race acting challenges like The Dakota Wind or Gay’s Anatomy, it’s an over-the-top riot that’s appropriately off the rails.
The cast features several Drag Race divas including All Stars 10 winner Ginger Minj and fan favourite Jujubee starring alongside queens Brooke Lynn Hytes, Symone, Marcia Marcia Marcia, and Latrice Royal with cameos by Monet X Change and Angeria Paris Van Michaels, plus an MVQ-worthy supporting turn by RuPaul herself as the President of the United States—as fine a Commander in Chief/First Lady as there ever was. Their familiar mugs lead the crazy train as it heads into a major storm while en route to Florida.
However, Drag Race fans will quickly notice one element of STOP! THAT! TRAIN! There’s no reference to drag, nor any nod to the transformations.
“I said to everybody, we’re not playing any of these characters as drag queens,” Shankman tells That Shelf. “Drag doesn’t exist in this universe.”
Shankman, speaking with That Shelf ahead of the Canadian premiere of STOP! THAT! TRAIN! last month, says that was the only way to bring drag to the big screen. “If we had made them up as drag queens, then that would have been the joke and that joke would have gotten tired,” says Shankman. “In order to keep the cavalcade of humour going, they needed to just not be drag queens. They just needed to be characters, for my version of this movie, certainly.”
The director notes that the queens’ star personas mean that fans already know them as drag artists, anyway, so there’s no need to reference the transformation. But it also points to a fact that the queens are real pros as performers. Moreover, having worked with stars like Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Michelle Pfeiffer, Shankman has fair authority on Hollywood’s finest.
“Here’s the thing that I believe that people should understand about the queens, which is that there is an extra layer on there,” says Shankman. “These are guys who come to work and become their drag personas and then those drag personas have to become the characters. So it is not straightforward. It is not a direct line. This kind of comedy is incredibly dependent upon everybody acting like they’re in a drama. I don’t think they would teach that to Meryl Streep, but the heroism that I got to watch every day with them, they were so professional. It was quite a thing to behold.”
Shankman says the queens stepped their pussies up for the movie, too, which they shot in a brisk 19 days. That zany energy imbues STOP! THAT! TRAIN! with its infectious screwball humour, too, as hostesses DeeDee (Jujubee) and Tess (Ginger Minj) lose their jobs at a bargain bin train line, but then take the advice of their colleague Barbara (Latrice Royale) to fill some vacancies on the swanky Glamazonian Express. Little do they know, though, that the hostesses on that train serve serious cunt along with snacks and drinks, fuelling rivalry with the three resident bitches (Brooke Lynn Hytes, Symone, Marcia Marcia Marcia) who strut up and down first class.
While all the queens have experience working a camera through the competition series, particularly the acting challenges, Shankman says the pace and laissez fair attitude helped with the learning curve of a theatrical production. “They don’t have to worry about being truthful and being truthful in close-ups, and you get to screw up. That’s part of competition television,” Shankman says on the acting challenges. “You’re doing the best you can, but it’s a different tattoo than the one you wear once you’ve been in a movie. That performance is locked forever and it’s a character. In Drag Race, you’re doing challenges.”
Shankman says that the bigger challenge for the queens was shifting to movie make-up that avoided the oversized exaggeration of their painted mugs. Audiences won’t see lips quite as full (aside from Brooke Lynn’s latest work) nor any cheeks quite as beat as they usually are.
“They were freaked out as hell when I said, ‘I do not want you in club makeup.’ I just want you to look pretty,” Shankman laughs. The same applies to RuPaul “That conversation happened. Early on I talked to Raven [RuPaul’s make-up artist and season two runner-up] and I talked to Ru about it,” explains Shankman. “I was like, ‘Let’s keep it muted. Let’s keep it really, really muted.’” The current President already shows the perils of wearing too much make-up, anyways.
The queens’ lewks shape the overall of the aesthetic of the film, too, with Shankman noting that his team had to shape the design of the train just right to complement the camp value. “I very intentionally wanted it to be more on the white side so that we could light it more easily for the queens,” he notes, particularly of the first class cars. “That’s the biggest shift: how you’re lighting everybody. You can’t just light a drag queen like a normal actor.”
The train also reflects the world building that informs the decision to keep the drag-ness out of the story. It’s a flamboyant set of cars capped off with one fine caboose, but the design doesn’t overwhelm the film with anything too crazy. “It’s this weird thing called the Glamazonian Express and it will have a queerness to it, and that was why the salmon colour came to exist in the coach car, but coach just kind of looks like coach. It doesn’t look like anything special,” says Shankman. “In fact, I would say the Amtrak Acela is just as nice. Maybe we had better lighting, but it was certainly nothing special.”
The settings instead make fish-out-of-water for all the non-drag actors who climb aboard the Glamazonian Express. STOP! THAT! TRAIN! features a parade of cameos with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicole Richie, Missi Pyle, and Lisa Rinna playing some of the passengers while Rachel Bloom, Michelle Visage, Matt Rogers, and Charro appear among the civil servants. Many of them are, of course, part of the Drag Race family as former judges.
“I was very adamant that the only people I wanted playing drag queens were people who worked for the train line,” says Shankman. “And that’s how it worked out, actually.” The director takes a moment and recaps the many cameos and the queens’ associations to the Glamazonian Express, some of which appear in flashback. (We won’t spoil the party.) “But to me, that’s what made it mostly like the old disaster movies and the parodies of them—that cavalcade of stars and putting more traditionally well-known actors in those roles.”
STOP! THAT! TRAIN! offers a throwback to big screen escapism, but also a reminder of how much fun it is for a movie to just serve silly, stupid fun. “There needs to be space for this amount of lightness,” notes Shankman. “I would never presume that I should be the arbiter of what Hollywood should do or not, but I think there needs to be space and there is with Scary Movie coming out. This kind of humour will always have the space to exist. We also live in a very challenging time for comedy. Because I work so much in comedy, the terror around not offending people makes it almost impossible to tell a joke unless it’s, like, hitting your head or it’s something physical.”
That observation invites a question about doing a boisterous comedy with queens in 2026. With drag serving as an easy flashpoint amid the culture wars, bringing the art form’s humour further into the mainstream gives the film another edge.
Shankman says he chose to ignore the haters and keep overt politics out of the film. “You can’t pay attention to it,” he says. “There’s only one moment where I suddenly was like, ‘I want to protect the drag queens on this one,’ which was the joke of giving the kid a drink.”
In one moment that admittedly drew a huge laugh from me, Jujubee hands a martini glass to a child while rolling her bar cart down the aisle. “One tepid flat water with olives,” she says with dead-pan hilarious perkiness while placing the drink before the kid.
“We only did that in one take because I didn’t think about it until we were shooting it,” explains Shankman. “I went, ‘I don’t think I can show a drag queen serving a kid a drink. I think people go insane.’ Weirdly, we seem to be able to kill kids right left, but serving one a drink, forget about it.”
But perhaps that’s what makes STOP! THAT! TRAIN! as radical as it is raucous. It creates a space where drag queens simply exist as everyday people.
“That’s it. That’s it. That’s the statement,” Shankman says when I put that line to him. “And what’s there to hate about that? When I see anti-drag sentiment, it just feels so boogie man-y to me. I feel like I’m back in elementary school getting picked on for being a sissy and it’s just like, ‘Oh, grow the fuck up. You want us to wipe us out? What are you talking about?’”
The director pauses for a moment and picks at the takeaway lunch placed before him, resuming the answer before stopping and starting again. “I long ago have … I don’t have an attitude about that anymore. Fuck you–we exist? I can’t … That’s exhausting,” he says.
“That’s exhausting. We do. Everybody knows it. Some people are really mad about it, but I don’t think they’re really that mad. They just need scapegoats and they need people to blame the woes of the world on. There’s that famous saying, ‘Be careful when you’re pointing your finger at somebody: you still have four pointed back at yourself.’ And taking it out on us as a group, it’s sort of like, because all y’all are so great? What are we talking about here?”
Shankman knows that STOP! THAT! TRAIN! will have its haters, but finds that a source of pride as the film claims its spot in the theatrical space. “People who do not want queer people to exist, this [film] is going to infuriate them, which, actually, I’d like to think it’s part of our strength,” says Shankman.
The director points to his adaptation of John Waters’ Hairspray as an example of a film that’s political in its own way, while inviting everyone in on the joke.
“It’s giving space to be in community, laugh and also the thinking part of it is subversive,” says Shankman. “The whole thing is a bright gumball coloured entertainment designed specifically to fill you with joy and to make you laugh and to entertain and distract. But both Hairspray and STOP! THAT! TRAIN!, you walk away and there’s something more going on. Hairspray does not wear that quietly, but the politicism of this film is not in the plot. It’s just in its existence.”
