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Alexis Campbell Starr is used to her face appearing on television, billboards and the sides of buses. But the Portland drag artist’s likeness appears briefly in a scene shown in a trailer for One of Them Days, the recently released comedy movie starring Keke Palmer and pop singer SZA (her film debut). Campbell Starr’s appearance on a photo wall of deadbeats in a loan shark’s office is the kind of Portland Easter egg average viewers would probably miss, but not her friends and family.
“I got calls from my friends in California, and they’re like, ‘We think we saw you in a movie last night!’ and I go, ‘Hmm,’” Campbell Starr says. “Then someone in Portland says, ‘We went and saw this movie and you’re in it!’ and I go, ‘Nooo…’ Then a friend from Arizona calls and goes, ‘Bitch, you are in this movie, it had to be you.’”
Campbell Starr says she originally posed for portraits in 2013 while being interviewed for a profile in Flossin’ Magazine discussing Northeast Portland’s LGBTQ+ culture. Campbell Starr produced Queens of the Night, one of the only drag shows in Portland at the time to regularly book an all-Black cast. The photographer had permission from Flossin’ to take photos for his own portfolio. Campbell Starr says he sold the portraits to Shutterstock, where they’ve had lives all their own ever since.
“We did all these different shots, and I’m thinking we’re never going to use these, it’s all for fun,” she says.
Sharp-eyed TV fans might recognize Campbell Starr as one of the global positioning system personalities on the 2018 Saturday Night Live sketch “GP Yass,” which she notes, as with One of Them Days, portrays her as being poor. “If only they knew,” she says, laughing. For one of his appearances on the Bravo Network talk show Watch What Happens Live, actor Terry Crews’ face was superimposed on Campbell Starr’s body as a joke. She says she confronted WWHL! host and Bravo boss Andy Cohen about the episode outside of the male strip club Stag in 2019 during LGBTQ+ Pride season. Campbell Starr says Cohen and Crews blocked her on Twitter after she posted about the episode, though WW could not find those tweets.
“I ran up on him outside of Stag and I was like, ‘You probably didn’t think you was ever going to fucking see me again,’” Campbell Starr says. “He was like, ‘Oh, do I know you?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, you do know me, the drag queen who tagged you from you using my face and my hair and my wig on your TV show!’ He was like, ‘I don’t remember,’ and I said, ‘I am the body of Terry Crews,’ and he’s like ‘Oh yeah, I kind of remember something about that,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you little bitch.’”
Campbell Starr doesn’t get paid for these photos, but she does hear when she ends up in ad campaigns, like one in Texas during the 2020 election cycle advocating LGBTQ+ gun ownership in which she brandishes a pistol. In the meantime, Campbell Starr plans watching herself on the big screen, then turning to social media to get Palmer, SZA and executive producer Issa Rae’s attention amid buzz that a One of Them Days sequel could already be in the works.
“Even if they just shout me out and act like we’re friends, that would be cool,” Campbell Starr says. “My main thing is, I would love for them to just acknowledge it, like, ‘Oh, girl, that was you!”