dishin' it

Bilal Hasna dishes on doing drag for ‘Layla,’ queer intimacy, & dancing to the ‘Glee’ soundtrack

By · Updated on March 19, 2024
Photo Credit: Getty Images

If you didn’t know the name Bilal Hasna yet, you sure will by the end of this month.

Yes, the twenty-something queer British actor is have a proper moment this March—the kind of moment that tells us this is honest to goodness capital-s Star in the making. And it couldn’t be happening to a better, sweeter, more talented guy.

A few weeks back, the second season of the incredibly charming superhero comedy Extraordinary dropped on Hulu, featuring Hasna’s return as the lovable Kash—his first proper recurring role on a television series.

This coming week, he can be seen in Netflix‘s highly anticipated sci-fi adaptation 3 Body Problem, based on Alexander Woo’s acclaimed novel of the same name and created by Game Of Thrones masterminds David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. So, if that’s an indication, this show’s going to be huge.

And then, before March is up, his dark, queer comedy series Dead Hot (co-starring Rye Lane‘s BAFTA-nominated Vivian Oparah) will make its American streaming debut on Tubi (March 29). Count it: That’s one, two, three different television seasons in one single month.

But Hasna can’t stop there: His feature film debut, Layla, just kicked off the latest edition of the BFI Flare LGBTQIA+ Film Festival in London, leaving audiences gooped and gaged. The film—from artist Amrou Al-Kadhi, a.k.a. Glamrou—sees the actor playing the titular Layla, a non-binary British-Palestinian drag queen who si surprised to find themself falling for Max, a more cis-normative gay with a fancy advertising career.

Layla actually made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival back in January, where Hasna was hailed by many (including yours truly) as one of the fest’s breakthrough performers. It’s also where we had the chance to sit down with Hasna and make him the latest guest of our rapid-fire Q&A series, Dishin’ It. In our conversation, the young star reflects on his major year ahead, the important life lessons gleaned from performing in a corset, and how he made his “drag debut”: lip-syncing to Glee.

Is there a piece of media—whether a movie, TV series, book, album, theater, video game, etc…—that you consider a big part of your own coming-out journey, or that has played an important role in your understanding of queerness? Why does it stand out to you?

I’m a massive fan of the director and writer Andrew Haigh. And, of course, in the queer world he’s absoltuely celebrated, but also in every world celebrated—he’s such an accomplished writer, such an accomplished director.

One of my favorite films of all time is his 2011 feature Weekend, which is about two gay men who find each other and basically have a three-day love affair where they sort of just spend three days in bed. What [Haigh] allowed for in that film is to talk about the ways in which, as a queer person, often when you have love affairs, it’s so incredibly tempestuous and intimate, and actually we feel much more of a calling to bare ourselves more in these limited circumstances. Because there aren’t many avenues to talk about all the things that we’ve gone through! So, when we meet another queer person—I think it happens with a lot of marginalized identities—there’s a kind of emotional turbulence there that happens so much quicker than in a straight relationship.

And I’ve definitely seen that through personal experiences as well, and I think that really put to light like that kind of dynamic. And, obviously, there’s difficulty there, and sometimes there’s a lot of problems in that kind of dynamic, but also I think his films are such a celebration of a kind of queer domesticity and queer intimacy. There’s something about being in bed for three days and baring your soul having just met someone that somehow feels quite queer to me. I think it’s a celebration of that and a problematization of that as well.

Image Credit: ‘Layla,’ BFI Flare Film Festival

Some of the themes your film Layla explores—how queerness is commodified even within the community—are rarely seen on screen. With that in mind, what’s something you hope other queer folks might be able to take away from the film?

One of the reasons I feel so lucky to be doing this film is because, when I was at university, Amrou was actually a figure that I really looked up to. They had written articles and they’d done this podcast for BBC Sounds, which I listened to and really made me interrogate my own identity as a queer Arab. And something that they talk about a lot in the context of drag is the ways in which drag is such an exemplification of a kind of creative tenacity that the queer community has. We don’t just say, to the pre-existing world order, “Please give us a space”—we create our own worlds that actually break categories, and that actually show how fluid different categories are. And show how you can realize yourself in a totally different kind of space—one of total liberation.

And I think by the end of the film—specifically for queer Arabs, or queer people that find themselves across different intersections and different matrixes of identity—I hope that it opens up a new world for them, a new world of expression, because that’s what Amrou did for me. Being queer and being Arab can exist in harmony, despite what the world, what the media might tell us—despite the rhetoric that we hear so often, and so dangerously. These things can exist in harmony, and actually, we have the power in ourselves to draw those harmonies.

You’ve said that, prior to working on this film, you have done a little bit of drag here and there, so what can you tell us about that—what were your first experiences with drag?

Basically, when I was a kid—like 11, 12, and 13—Ramadan used to fall in the summer months in the U.K., and I would sort of move into my cousin’s house. And in the day time, to pass the time—because we couldn’t eat or drink—we’d make these music videos. And in these music videos, I’d get into my cousin’s dresses, I’d get into my aunt’s dresses—often Arab dresses, and it’s so interesting that this film feels like a realization fo so many things in my life.

And so that was my first experience, I guess, of quote-unquote “cross dressing,” you know? And that was maybe the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, those summers filming those music videos. Since then, at university, I did a little bit of amateur drag, but like no big performances or anything.

And I had experimented with makeup before, but really it was on this film that I was given the opportunity to perform professionally as a drag queen—thanks to such an extraordinary team, specifically the makeup department run by this extraordinary woman called Adele Firth, and my makeup artists Guy Common. They taught me the art of drag makeup and they taught me about what it really takes—the kind of Olympic feat and the artistic feat of beating a face. That was a big learning experience for me, and now I have such a visceral appreciation for it.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Well now we have to ask: These music videos—what were they? What was pre-teen Bilal dancing and singing to at the time?

We’re talking the Glee soundtrack, okay? We’re talking “Loser Like Me,” we’re talking “Don’t Rain On My Parade.” We’re also talking “TGIF” by Katy Perry, which involved us baking a cake, putting icing on it, putting gingerbread sticks on it that spelled “TGIF,” and me just sticking my face in it and eating it. And I guess that’s sort of the queer filth that we see in the film—I think there’s maybe a whole history here that starts with that cake and ends with indulging in your own filth.

I had to remove [those videos] from internet because I didn’t want to get into the wrong hands because I was very young! But I do have them, and I would love to show them to the world someday.

In the process of preparing for and performing in this role, what would you say is the most challenging aspect of drag—whether physically or otherwise?

In the beginning of the film, something that really excited me was when I first read the early “corporate pride performance” sort of takedown scene. Because we hear a lot that pride and queerness has been so corporatized and commodified for capital gain—really not for a sort of human rights framework. But there was something about the process of doing that scene, but also walking the streets of London in full drag to get to a location and seeing the ways in which you’re treated, the ways in which you’re locked at.

Of course, I was totally protected on the job, but even having that visceral understanding of the way in which the world looks at you, the way in which the world commodifies you, the way in which the world fetishize you—that was happening to me in real time as I was performing. So even though I understood that from the outside, as someone who isn’t a drag queen, the whole thing was just such a visceral understanding.

And, in a way, the whole thing requires such confidence, such self belief, and this is something that all the queens on that job taught me. They possess this sort of ineffable and totally indestructible power of confidence. And that’s not to say that they aren’t flawed, but I think part of being a queen is actually just rejecting any sort of harmful view of yourself.

This really is a major moment for you—the spring alone you’ve got season two of Extraordinary, you’ve got the dark comedy Dead Hot, you’ve got Netflix’s sci-fi epic 3 Body Problem—but Layla really was your first lead role in a feature. What’s something the experience of being number one on the call sheet, so to speak, has taught you?

This film was definitely the busiest schedule I’ve ever had as an actor. Layla is in every single scene in the film—there are about 160 different scenes in this film, and Layla is in about 159. So I was in all day, every day. The makeup call was much earlier than others because Layla’s in drag so often. So I think something I learned is actually endurance, and that filming is often a marathon, not a sprint. And, you know, when you’re cinched five inches in a corset and you’re in nine inch stilettos for twelve hours a day, you really learn what the limits of your body are.

And, actually, now going into other jobs, everything’s so much easier! I’ve just finished a job for Amazon, and my makeup call was 10 minutes—and often it would only take five minutes. So you appreciate these things, and you appreciate how much you’re capable of! Yeah. And you appreciate actually like how much you’re how much you’re capable of. And I feel very proud that I was able to accomplish doing that film and doing it in a way that I feel really proud of.

Where’s one of the first spaces you can remember that made you feel a part of a queer community?

I think the first time I felt like that would have been when I was a teenager. I really wanted to be a dancer, and I really wanted to be in musical theater. So Layla is such a realization of all these things. But I used to go to the Saturday school for musical theater performance, and everyone there—all the guys there were queer—and I came from a school where there were no queer people, I was the only one and that was a difficult experience in and of itself. So, to be in that space with others who had already gone on that journey, who had accepted themselves, was so powerful for me.

But also because we were dancing, we were being fluid. We were expressing ourselves! And I still think dance is one of the most extraordinary mediums because you can express things that you could never do in words. And that had to do with me and my sexuality. So performing commercial jazz to “One Night Only,” those kinds of things, it was absolutely revolutionary for me. So that was the first time I felt like really accepted I think; I felt like I could be myself in Technicolor, you know?

Who is a queer or trans artist/performer/creator that you think is doing really cool work right now? Why are they someone we should all be paying attention to?

The person that comes to mind is already quite famous, but I think it’s important to highlight her because she really is extraordinary: Monroe Bergdorf. For as long as I have been following her, she has used her platform to champion all sorts of social justice causes that are so close to her heart—not only because they fall under the remit of her own identity, but because she understands the networks of solidarity and the networks and oppression that exist globally across different kinds of structures of domination. So I want to platform her and highlight her in this interview because I think, for the longest time, she has used her voice in the service of good. And if there’s if there’s anything that’s queer, it’s that!

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