In Name Drop: The Really Good Celebrity Stories I Usually Only Tell At Happy Hour, Ross Mathews dishes on his life being celebrity adjacent. The one time Tonight Show intern, frequent E! red carpet correspondent, Celebrity Big Brother runner up, and RuPaul’s Drag Race judge has been around the “standing next to really big names” block a few times, and he’s not afraid to tell you almost all the dirty details.
In the book—and on the audiobook, which he also narrates—Mathews dishes on run-ins with everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Brandi Glanville. While some are just little tidbits—take the time he followed Liza Minelli into a restaurant in New York, for instance—others, like Mathews’ tale of being harshly cold shouldered and on-air bullied by legendary broadcaster Barbara Walters are more in-depth.
The A.V. Club talked with a self-quarantining Mathews about Name Drop, that run-in with Walters, and his relationship with legendary drag queen Jackie Beat.