After making history as the first drag queen MasterChef winner, Ginger Johnson has huge TV dreams

Christmas dinner is down to Ginger Johnson this year. Two years after winning RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2023, the entertainer has bagged her second first place trophy, storming Celebrity MasterChef 2025 and winning the whole thing.

“Normally, I have a very simple Christmas dinner. I actually really like to have steak and chips because it’s only me and my partner and the cats,” she says on Zoom from her Battenburg-patterned kitchen, so neat and dainty it looks like it’s been pulled straight from a doll’s house. “But given the context of this year’s Christmas, I’m going to have to pull my finger out a little bit and do something special, I think.”

Wearing one of her signature copper wigs and a 70s-style blouse, and exuding the energy of a slightly batty art teacher, she laughs as much as she talks. She’s feeling remarkably jolly, understandably so: prior to her Celebrity MasterChef win, cooking was all-but alien to her.

“I’ve always liked eating. It’s always been a very big part of my life,” says the 37-year-old, County Durham-born star. “I don’t struggle to feed myself three times a day and I’m not shy of having two dinners if I really want them.” Since winning Drag Race, she’s been largely on the road, with hardly any access to a microwave, let alone a kitchen full of utensils. But in the run up to her appearance on MasterChef, she used YouTube to teach herself. It was a slightly manic experience which involved breaking four pasta machines.

“There was one day I was actually doing it in drag,” she says, explaining that she needed as much practice in her Ginger Johnson get-up as possible. “I had to go to Argos in full drag to buy another pasta maker machine, because my dough was so hard that when I was winding it through the machine it was mangling and breaking it open.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, she didn’t think she would make it very far.

“I was absolutely astounded. I think you can tell when they announced the winner. I couldn’t believe it. I believe the first words that came out of my mouth were, ‘Are you sure?’” she howls. “It’s a really intense process, and I never believed that I would get to the end, never mind win. I felt the same about Drag Race to be honest. Maybe I underestimate myself. Maybe I need to have a bit more confidence.”

While Ginger sliced, sauteed and simmered her way to the win with a ’70s-inspired menu, beating off author Dawn O’Porter and former rugby player Alun Wyn Jones, judges Grace Dent and John Torode were clearly as much enamoured with her puckish personality as her food.

This year marked food critic Grace Dent’s first year as a MasterChef host, following former host Gregg Wallace being dropped by the show after more than half of 83 allegations of inappropriate behaviour levied against him were substantiated by the BBC (Torode has also since exited, following an accusation of racist language also being upheld). For Ginger, Dent is a pretty flawless replacement.

“When I walked in on the first day and I saw her there, I immediately felt at home because Grace – and I’m sure she would be happy to hear this – Grace is a queen. An absolute queen,” she says.

“That energy in the room, it gave me the strength to bring my A game,” she adds. “It’s like she’s been there forever. She absolutely owns that kitchen. She was fabulous, really fabulous.”

Ginger Johnson might be the first drag queen to win any season of MasterChef globally, but she’s far from the first to compete; her Drag Race UK sisters Kitty Scott-Claus, Cheryl Hole and Baga Chipz have all given the competition a good whack in recent years. Yet Cheryl in particular experienced pretty grim backlash to her appearance, for the mere fact of being in drag. 

The trolls will be thrilled to know that they didn’t deter Ginger from competing in the slightest.

“As my mother RuPaul says, what other people think of me is absolutely none of my business. I am not interested. I’m out there living my life and for any one person that might have had something negative to say about me, I know that there were lots of other people cheering me on, lots of other people really happy to see me there, really happy to see the representation of LGBTQ people on TV on Prime Time BBC One,” she smiles.

“So I don’t think about the people that don’t have nice things to say about me. I haven’t got the time for that. I’m too busy enjoying my life.”

Over the next 12 months, Ginger will be enjoying life just a little bit more, with her MasterChef trophy perched nicely on her kitchen windowsill. Her comedy tour Show Pony kicks off in September 2026, and until then she’s open for any and all TV gigs that come her way. Well, almost.

“Which one should we take on next?” she asks. What about donning a spray tan and a glittered jumpsuit for a whirl around the Strictly Come Dancing ballroom? “I’m not much of a dancer and that might end up being a bit of a humiliation ritual if I was to do that.” She grimaces. “But I’d love to get myself round the roundtable up in Scotland and fight it out with some people. That would be fun,” she adds, referring to Claudia Winkleman’s main TV squeeze, The Traitors.

“I have always wanted to go on Taskmaster. I love Taskmaster and they’ve never had a drag queen before, which means they’ve never had a drag queen winner. So maybe the Taskmaster trophy is number three,” she grins. 

And what about food – could we soon be seeing the BBC’s first cooking show hosted by a drag star? She’s already moving into the food influence space, sort of, having just posted a ranking on Instagram of every Christmas sandwich on the high street.

“I’ve really caught the bug now, and I’m definitely going to be doing a lot more cooking,” Ginger says. “I’ve recently made my kitchen into the 1970s dream that you see before you now. Keep an eye out for it,” she teases. “Certainly on the internet I’m going to be doing a lot more cooking.”

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