How 'Dominatrix' Drag Queens Whipped To Wong Foo's Stars Into Shape

For Patrick Swayze, portraying Vida Boheme in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar was "the most emotional experience I've ever had."

In celebration of the groundbreaking LGBTQ+ film's 25th anniversary, NBC's Today re-released its 1995 interviews with Swayze and costars Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo. In the clip, they revealed how they prepared for their now-iconic roles as drag performers whose car breaks down in small-town America.

"The challenge I think it was, could I really pull this lady off? Because Miss Vida, she, in many ways, propels the emotional through-line and she had to be filled with love and compassion and a nurturing spirit," Swayze told Bryant Gumbel.

"I found in rehearsal every time I started playing her like 'Miss Thing,' and going out there and being outrageous ... I realized that I'll blow this character. She had to be real. If you're going to put this big drag queen in scenes with a serious actress like Stockard Channing or Blythe Danner or whoever -- she had to be real," he added. "You had to get sucked into her emotional life and really care about her. So what started out to be a fun lark, you know, where I was going to just have a kick and be outrageous, it turned out to be the most emotional experience I've ever had."

Snipes discussed how he drew upon Maya Angelou, Bette Midler, his grandmother, and groundbreaking Black actor Roscoe Lee Browne to fill Noxeema's heels.

"My grandmother is the humor and Bette Midler is the walk. You know, her whole type of jiggle type of walk," Snipes said. "And Maya and Roscoe, they have a command and control over the English language and words. They make words sound like it's a food dish, you know, so I thought that it was a good thing for Noxeema, who was very arts-educated and cultural, to be able to use words in a very romantic type of fashion."

(Related: The Amazing Story Behind To Wong Foo)

Leguizamo revealed to Gumbel that it took "hours and hours in front of the mirror, walking back and forth" to master the physicality of the characters -- with some help from drag queen coaches, who he called "guardian angels, except they were more like dominatrixes."

"They're like 'Papi, walk that walk! You better start doing that! You better get that attitude, please!' And they'd make us walk back and forth, make the sashay and swish and get it all in the hips and do all that stuff until we got it right," Leguizamo said. "And they go, 'Now you got the look, you got the look now go ahead and do it!'"

"I knew was going to rock," he said of his expectations during rehearsals. "I mean if you put Wesley, me, and Patrick together, you got you the four corners of the universe... Black, white, and Latin going crazy. It's got to work, it's got to rock."

Swayze added, "You can imagine Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo put in drag and given license to be divas, so needless to say, we were close to uncontrollable."

Watch the interviews below.