Like many dancers, Strictly’s Johannes Radebe is a guilty smoker. In the absence of an actual cigarette, his right hand arcs and flicks through the air as he talks. He inhales phantom smoke like a Golden Age Hollywood diva: an effect enhanced by the long, shiny, red nails he wears every day while turning in an electrifying performance as drag queen Lola in the musical Kinky Boots on the West End.
“I have started to feel incomplete without them, oh my gosh!” he laughs, glancing down to admire his scarlet daggers. They’re so extravagantly impractical that I wonder if he can use them as an excuse to dodge daily chores, but he shakes his head in shock at the suggestion.
“Oh, no. I was down on my hands and knees cleaning my floors yesterday. I knew people would be coming back to my place after [the Olivier Awards ceremony] and I said to myself, ‘Johannes, you are a gay man. You cannot be caught by all these theatre people – and a stylist! – with dirty floors.’”
The combination of dramatic charisma and hard-grafting generosity is what has made the 6ft 2in South African one of Strictly’s best-loved professional dancers. As a young man growing up in the township of Zamdela, he reminds me, he put food on his family table with a range of menial jobs including slogging it out with a sponge at the car wash. So he’d earned the right to be lifted and twirled aloft like a glitter ball by Bake Off-winning dance partner John Whaite in Strictly’s first all-male couple pairing in 2021.
“Being lifted?” he sighs today. “Ohhh, it unlocked parts of me that I did not know were there and did not know needed to be unlocked.”
Today, he’s teamed his manicure with a simple plaid shirt for a video chat that starts cheery, but will bring us both to tears as he describes his journey from the homophobic bullying – the sudden punches and shouts of “Sissy boy” – of his “sad, stifling” school days to sequined stardom.
Radebe was born in the northern South African city of Sasolburg, in April 1987. Times were tough for Radebe’s parents. His mother separated from his father (who worked for Coca Cola) when he and his sister were children and they moved in with his maternal aunt – the woman who became the most passionate supporter of his dancing career, which began at the age of seven.
“But my love of drag came before my love of dancing,” he explains. “It came from watching my mum putting on her lipstick. She had one lipstick that she mixed with Vaseline to make it last longer… I admired the precision as she did it. She looked like a beauty queen.”
While lipstick transformed his mother into that “beauty queen” he mentions, alcohol transformed his father into “an ugly, violent man”. “I loathed my father and I hated alcohol for a long time. My dad was quite blatant about the way he wanted my mum gone when their marriage ended. I hated the way he could make her cry because my mum is the love of my life.”
Her love and affirmation, he explains, “is what helped me push away the suicidal thoughts I grappled with”. The bullying caused him to consider suicide? “Yes.” He recalls how his mother feared for him after a gay friend left the township for Johannesburg. “We heard stories that he was working as a prostitute. He was subjected to anything.” When Radebe’s “dear, beautiful” friend eventually came home, they were HIV positive and “very ill”. Radebe shakes his head. “She had changed her name to a woman’s name. I remember my mum turning around and saying to me, ‘I hope you never come home like that.’ It was a shock to me. I thought her love was unconditional.”
His mother’s reaction to his friend caused Radebe to “battle” with a powerful yearning to express his feminine side. Even after moving away from home at 13 to live with a dance coaching couple in Gauteng province, he felt conflicted over his love of sparkles. “I felt it as I was winning competitions, while I was working on cruise ships and even into my career on Strictly.” He began his TV journey on the South African Strictly in 2014, before joining the British show in 2018.
But he was able to address the issue with his mother after being paired with John Whaite in the dance contest. “I flew back home immediately after the finale” – in which he and Whaite came second to actress Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice – “and I got to watch it with my whole family on Christmas Day because the show airs a week later there.” How did that go? “I cannot tell you how much joy!” He says. “There were tears, apologies, affirmations. Even my uncle said, ‘You guys look so beautiful together.’”
Choreographing dances with Whaite caused Radebe some sleepless nights. “I’m such a late bloomer,” he admits. “I struggled with creating dances for two men in the beginning. It was Shirley Ballas who pulled me aside. She said, ‘You need to entwine the movement. Stop dancing side by side…’” Put some more romance in it? “Yes. I didn’t sleep at all that night.”
He was facing up to his years of “shying away from the world, hiding who I am, resisting the gaze of people who might judge me”. He realised this pairing would require him to “change all my methods, because I have always danced with women. Women are my people. I didn’t know how to handle a man.”
When he realised he wanted Whaite to lift him, he approached the conversation with trepidation. “I said, ‘I want to do something beautiful here. I want you to lift me but I don’t want to hurt you.’” But in Whaite’s arms, he was giddy to find his muscular form “transformed into a feather. He made me fly. I have lifted so many women and so I know the care that goes into looking after and celebrating another person’s body that way. It is such a vulnerable place to be in and yet I had never felt so safe.”
Tears well up in his eyes. “I have always been the matriarch, the provider, the one with the responsibility.” He recalls all the years he “felt the responsibility, as a boy, to look after my mother and sister. It was not my responsibility, because I was a child. But I forced myself because otherwise we would have had nothing to eat.”
But when Whaite picked him up, all that weight fell away. “In all my years of dancing, it was the first time I had been looked after that way. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, John, I feel so safe in your arms,’ and he said, ‘You should’.”
In later interviews, Whaite was quoted as saying he “fell in love” with Johannes during their time on the show. But Radebe is annoyed at how the statement was taken out of context. “It was not tasteful, how John was misinterpreted on that,” he says. “John had a partner who was a big part of our journey, who was bringing in our lunches to the rehearsal studio. So I was sad at how that got reframed by the media.” But he does say: “I had never formed such a good friendship so fast, after we clashed in the beginning. It was wonderful. Wherever you are, John my love, I love you!”
While Whaite is married, Radebe remains single and brushes off my suggestion that he seems to be in the right state of mind to find love himself. “I live at the Coliseum while I’m in Kinky Boots,” he shrugs. “And when that finishes, Strictly will come around again, so I think I’m just too busy…”
Radebe is proud of helping change the culture with their on-screen partnership. “I get letters from children who loved watching us,” he says. He’s aware homophobia is still present in the UK (where he was recently granted the “glitterball of citizenship”).
“I know that for sure, it exists. But I also know I can walk into a coffee shop in all sorts of small towns, and find I get breakfast for free because somebody just loves watching me on Strictly and wants to do something wonderful for me.
“And how beautiful is that? I never feel lost in this country.”
Back in South Africa, he also feels attitudes are changing. “When I go home, I visit the family that took me in, and [the man who bullied him most severely when they were boys] still lives down the road with his mother, so I often bump into him.” Have you talked to him about how he made you feel? “Yes, I have. We confronted everything. He said, ‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry,’ and I said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t know the half of it, do you want to know the truth or do you want to leave it at that? Because honey, I’ve moved on and I don’t need the apology.’”
But to his credit, his former bully did want the truth. So the pair sat down together and talked it through. “We played some music. We had a long conversation. He has kids now and I think the thought of anyone making his kids feel how I felt helped change his views…” As they parted, Radebe gave him a copy of his best-selling 2023 autobiography, JoJo: Finally Home.
But today he breaks down in tears as he admits it wasn’t until he took the role of Lola in Kinky Boots that he realised he was truly loved and accepted for who he is. He knew he’d have to work on his singing to hold his own with X Factor-winning co-star Matt Cardle. And he decided to “tone down” his dancing to allow the rest of the drag queens in the cast to shine. “But when I come out on stage and the crowd applauds me in my red dress, when they accept me with all my imperfections?” He wipes away tears. “It feels so wonderful.”
He admits he was worried about how his mother would react to the part. “But now I FaceTime her while I’m putting on my Lola make up and she tells me I look beautiful.” He says that they spoke about her reaction to his trans teenage friend and he realised her disapproval came from a place of fear for him. “There were rumours that my friend took his own life.” And she just didn’t want that for you? “No. She wanted to protect her son.”
Radebe wishes his father were still alive to see the show. “Lola gets to tell her father she loves him. I would absolutely love to have a conversation with my dad about everything. I wish I could say I am sorry, because now I’m a man, and I understand him. Because of him, I do know what it feels like to feel a father’s love.”
In Kinky Boots, Lola’s homophobic father is dying of lung cancer. It allows her to quip camply that “the fags got him in the end”. Radebe winces when I ask if he has plans to quit smoking. “I did try vaping,” he says. “But it’s not as elegant and I dropped it in a day.” He shrugs. “But I have decided I will go to a clinic once Kinky Boots is finished.”
He smiles and takes one last lingering faux drag. “It’s bad for me, isn’t it? I deserve to treat myself better.”
‘Kinky Boots’ is at the London Coliseum until 11 July (londoncoliseum.org)
For confidential support, Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call for free on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org