Drag queen Mia Starr: Working with Jennifer Lopez at Super Bowl was ‘hell’

(NewsNation) — Not all queens love Jennifer Lopez.

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” fan favorite Mia Starr, who has danced with Britney Spears and Rihanna, said her experience working with J.Lo at the 2020 Super Bowl “felt like hell.”

Starr appeared on Mistress Isabelle Brooks’ YouTube show to talk about the experience and later elaborated for Entertainment Weekly about how Lopez body-shamed her and was petty to her during the “uncomfortable” gig in Miami.

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Starr, who was booked by the halftime show’s choreographer, quit her job on the casting team for reality competition series “The Voice”  to work with Lopez.

But Lopez was initially unimpressed with Starr, who claims on the second day of rehearsals, J.Lo “looks at me, comes up next to me, and is like, ‘Hey, can you take off your shirt? I did it, and the look of disgust she gave me … now, people are looking.”

Mia told EW a “huge speech” followed, and Lopez told the dancers, “Guys, I need you to elevate yourself. You’re dancing for me!”

“I get it, but I was like, b—-, this is literally day two, and we have three months, and I know my body. I’m going to snatch it back if we’re going to be dancing 60 hours a week. We have three more months, give me a break!” Mia said.

Mia Starr: J.Lo made me feel ‘icky’ about body

The drag superstar then claims Lopez asked “all the boys” to take their shirts off for the next few hours of rehearsals, which, Mia says, “was so uncomfortable” for her.

“It just felt like an icky feeling. But, as a dancer, obviously, you are getting paid to look good. But I was coming straight from office casting work. This job came out of left field, and I was grateful for it,” she recalls, noting that she got herself into better shape as time went on. Still, she says that “to a normal person, I wasn’t huge,” but that Lopez “made it very clear that she was not pleased with my image, the way she gave that look of disgust. I was like, oh, this is embarrassing.”

The next day, a catering truck with ice cream arrived outside of the rehearsal space, and Starr made sure she “was one of the first people in line” to get a snack.

“I said, ‘Thank you’ [to Lopez],” Mia adds, laughing once again. “She gave that speech again; she was like, ‘Guys, I need you to elevate yourself.’ Clearly, at this point, I was like, she hates me. I’m so petty. If I know you don’t like me, I’m going to do everything in my power to make you really not like me. I’m going to give you a reason to not like me.”

Lopez would “always come in rehearsals, maybe the last two hours after we’d rehearsed eight hours of a 10-hour day, and she’d just be like, ‘I hate it,’ and give this big spiel,” which would result in more changes … and more rehearsals.

And while Lopez “was super sweet to the kids,” she “would always pretty much remind [the adult dancers] that we look like s—.”

“That’s the process of dancing and production. Things are always going to change. But I was reminded that we looked a mess,” Mia said. “I’m busting my ass. This dream job wasn’t what I expected in the sense that this is the biggest moment of a dancer’s career, and it felt like hell up until the point of the performance,” with which she says Lopez was ultimately pleased.

“I’m Team Shakira,” Starr told Isabella Brooks.

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Meanwhile, Starr said Lopez pulled a fast one on her with the 2022 Netflix documentary, “Halftime,” which Starr and other dancers weren’t aware of … and weren’t paid for.

Starr then claims she was asked to sign a release without pay and said, “I was like, no, you didn’t put me through all of that to not pay me. I didn’t sign the paper. There were a few of us who didn’t sign. They somehow found a loophole to still put me in it.”

At the end, Starr said she received “a $20 check” as compensation.

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“It was so insulting,” Mia says. “I told my agent, ‘You know what, actually, you can just please send this back, they clearly need it more than I do.’ I sent it back because it’s super insulting. I just had to laugh at that point. I was like, this is unreal.”

“They asked me back for a random one-off,” in Los Angeles, Mia says. “And I said no. I was like, nope, no, no, no, ever. Ever.”

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