Find What it Means to be “Lady Like” With Lady Camden

“RuPaul’s Drag Race” season 14 runner-up, Lady Camden, takes to Denver this Saturday for a special screening of her new documentary film, “Lady Like.”

As Lady Camden (also known as Rex Wheeler) catapulted to fame during her “Drag Race” season, she began working with director Luke Willis to capture the process. The two began working together before “Drag Race,” collaborating on short films and music videos when Willis brought the idea of making a documentary to Lady Camden. “I started to realize that there was so much more to Lady Camden’s story than a competition reality TV show was going to be able to do justice to. There was something more intimate, more inspiring, and more magical happening,” Willis explained.

The opportunity to document a rise to fame was one that filmmakers rarely get, and Willis was able to recognize this and document how this journey would impact Wheeler. “I’m interested in learning how this affects Rex, how it affects his relationships, and how it affects his ability to manage his own life and [his] personal takeaways and discoveries from it,” Willis explained of his mindset going into filming. 

“I think I also just knew that this was an exciting time to capture. I think every ‘Drag Race’ contestant dreams of going on the show and doing well and winning, but there’s a lot of memories that you don’t want to sort of lose or let go of, which they naturally do in our brains,” Lady Camden added, explaining why she decided to work with Willis to make the documentary in the first place. “I think it’s nice to have a capsule of this really special memory that only happens once in your life.” 

The documentary follows Lady Camden as she revisits her past, as well as her present, to work through her sudden rise to fame and the exhaustion that comes with that. “It just became more and more this story of homecoming, and more and more, this story of healing your inner child, as I realized the finding of the tribe that he had been searching for his whole life was finally happening,” Willis summarized. “It’s so funny to me when you find where you’re meant to be, and things click. I always find that they click in big ways, and that’s exactly what started to happen for Rex. It’s like he finally figured out where he belonged and where he fit into this world, and then it clicked in a way that made him this huge, famous drag queen runner-up on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’”

This was a process that was simultaneously freeing and difficult for Lady Camden, as she revisited her hometown and the spaces that raised her while creating this documentary, as well as continuing to perform after her “Drag Race” win. “It brings up really cool nostalgia, of like, I remember this place, I remember that place so fondly,” Lady Camden told us at OFM. “But then when you’re older, you have such a different perspective on it. It’s not the same when you look back on stuff as a more fully formed adult that has become a different, stronger person that stands up for yourself more and has a different perspective on life. It was hard to go back to physical places and remember feeling like I just wanted to be an adult, and I didn’t want to be a kid anymore. I just wanted to get out of that.”

Specifically, the film team visited the Royal Ballet School, where Rex grew up and deeply impacted the way he moves throughout the world when he was rejected from the upper levels of the school and had to work to find a new path. This ballet background is something that ties Rex and Willis together as artists and collaborators who both have this ballet mindset. “The theme of resilience that is threaded throughout our film, that really is informed a lot by this experience of having grown up ballet dancers and understanding what it means to really have your heart broken, to really fall and hurt yourself, and then need to get back up and keep going,” Willis explained. 

This theme of a ballerina’s resilience is characteristic of the documentary, as both Willis and Lady Camden hope it is something that audiences take away from the film, as well as an understanding that it’s okay to be vulnerable with your struggles. “I hope people walk away from it being able to embrace that you don’t have to be a perfect version of yourself for people to really love what you’re doing and to be inspired by what you’re doing,” Lady Camden expressed. “It’s okay to just be on your process and on your journey and enjoy that and that you just don’t have to have it all together at all times to be successful and to be doing what you love doing to be happy.”

The Lady Like film showing will be the night of Saturday, September 7, at Sie Filmcenter. Tickets for the VIP Meet & Greet reception at 6 pm are $75 and include an exclusive reception with Lady Camden and Willis, priority seating, an autographed poster, and one free drink ticket. The film screening will begin at 7:30 pm, followed by a Q&A with Lady Camden and Willis. GA tickets for the film with Q&A are $25 for Denver Film members and $30 for non-members.

After the screening tour of the film, Lady Camden will be focusing on her solo projects, such as her Christmas tour and Pride show, and hopes to invest more time and money into those artistic projects, such as ballet, that she loves the most. Willis will be working on several feature-length projects, one including Lady Camden, and invites anyone with questions to reach out to atticboxprods@gmail.com.