Pageant Interview Tips For 2025
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Interview is one of the most intimidating sections for many would-be pageant queens, yet also one of the most fun and enjoyable once you master it.
As much as you may be able to 'show your personality' through the way you dress and the way you walk, nothing quite takes the place of being given a chance to talk about who you are, what sets you apart and what you’re passionate about.
Five Important Interview Skillsets To Master
Most interview coaches tend to give you answers to either model or outright copy without telling you WHY to answer it in that particular way, however knowing the underlying mechanics of what makes an interview answer great, awful, or somewhere in between is crucial to not only performing well at interview, but also to being able to adapt to unexpected questions and situations.
The truth is you absolutely could memorise interview answers if you wanted to. I don't recommend it, not only because it feels somewhat like cheating, but also because it will make you sound robotic and rehearsed. It will also leave you embarrassingly stuck if a question pops up that you haven’t pre-prepared an answer for.
The reality is that the best interviewees do prepare their answers to a degree (we’ll call them ‘canned answers’ for want of a better term), but they also have a firm grasp of certain fundamental interview skillsets that allow them to adapt to unexpected questions and sound fresh and original in the process.
Skillset #1: Know Your Talking Points
The most cliche advice in pageantry is ‘be yourself’. But how are you supposed to BE yourself if you don’t KNOW yourself?
To put it simply, you need to know what sets you apart from the other contestants, and that takes a little introspection and soul-searching.
Try making a bullet-point list of all the things you’d like to bring up or mention in your interview. That list should include things such as personal qualities, professional achievements, advocacies etc.
Here are a few prompts to get you started. Make sure to prepare both your answers AND your reasoning for your answer:
What are you passionate about?
How would you describe yourself in three words?
What got you interested in pageantry to begin with?
Why did you choose to compete in this pageant system?
What are your plans for the title should you happen to win?
What is your favourite colour?
What are your hobbies?
What is the most difficult obstacle you’ve had to overcome in your life?
What is your greatest fear?
What would you say your greatest accomplishment is?
This is by no means an exhaustive list. The point is to get you reflecting on who you are and why you’d make an excellent titleholder.
Once we have our talking points, we then want to make sure we give our answers in an interesting and entertaining way which leads us to…
Skillset #2: Storytelling
Have you ever wondered why most people will happily sit through a three-hour superhero movie, but not a thirty-minute lecture? Even if the lecture is about something useful?
It all comes down to the art of storytelling.
When giving your interview answers, try to wrap them up in some sort of personal story. It doesn’t need to be a long one, nor does it need to be a life-changing one, it just needs to be something other than a stream of dry statistics or achievements.
When we listen to someone telling a story, our conscious walls go down and we enter a state similar to hypnosis. We become entranced. Think of the fairytales your parents used to read to you as a child. They didn’t just tell you what to do or how to behave, they wrapped it up in an interesting story (hence the phrase ‘moral of the story’).
Rather than simply answering pageant questions in a very literal way, try wrapping it up in a story. The content of your answer may not change that much, but you will have a much more entranced and enthralled audience, which means they’re going to remember YOU and think of you as interesting, even if technically you gave the same answer as everyone else.
Check out this example of Matthew McConaughey describing who his hero is - it went viral NOT because of the answer, but because of the STORY he told about his answer:
It’s not enough to simply talk about yourself in an interesting way however. You also need to know WHAT you’re talking about, which leads us to the next skill…
Skillset #3: Be Informed
Regardless of which system you’ve entered into, you should do your best to keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the world, especially if your pageant happens to be focussed on a particular advocacy such as Miss Earth.
Following up from this, make sure you have formulated your own considered opinions on current relevant issues such as gender equality, racial inequality, the environment etc. And by ‘considered’, I mean you need to be able to not only HAVE an opinion, you need to be able to explain how you arrived at it.
As an aside, when you are asked for your opinion on a topic, make sure you ANSWER the question (this applies to every pageant interview question you’ll ever be asked). There are a LOT of judges out there whose first criteria for judging your response is whether you actually answered the question or not.
That doesn’t mean you should be disrespectful when giving your opinion, it just means you can’t sidestep the question and expect to do well.
All this being said, if you are asked about an issue that you know nothing about, give the best answer you can WITHOUT making things up. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you haven’t heard about a particular topic and there’s a good chance you could direct your answer to a similar topic that you DO know about, but making things up in an interview is NEVER a good idea.
We now want to take skillsets 1, 2, and 3 and combine them into…
Skillset #4: Prepare Canned Answers
If you’ve been in pageantry longer than a couple of years, you’ll notice how often the same interview questions tend to crop up. And whilst you might like there to be more original lines of questioning out there, the fact is that very repetition gives you the opportunity to make your answers to those questions better and better each time.
This is where ‘canned answers’ come in. They’re prepared answers, but not memorised answers. Think of them as a musician performing at a live concert - no two performances are going to be exactly the same, but the same set pieces are going to be there.
A typical example of a canned answer to prepare would be telling a simple short story (skillset #2) that highlights one of your talking points (skillset #1) and relating it to a current issue that you were asked about (skillset #3). For pageant interviews, the canned answer should probably be no longer than thirty seconds max.
What these answers allow you to do is cram as much information about yourself into as short a timeframe as possible, whilst keeping it super entertaining and relevant. If you had a longer interview, there might be more wiggle room to make it up on the spot, but when your entire interview might be no longer than a couple of minutes, you don’t want to waste half of it on rambling, spinning your wheels, or telling a story that goes nowhere.
The best way of practicing and improving your canned answers is to simply practice answering as many interview questions as you can. REPETITION is the mother of all skill (I strongly suggest recording your interview answers and playing them back right away so that you can give yourself some immediate feedback).
In essence this is the same methodology many stand-up comedians use when coming up with a new routine. They’ll tell a set of new jokes, keep the ones which get the most laughs and either improve on or discard the rest, leaving room for new ones. In this way the amazingly polished ‘impromptu’ performance may not be quite as ‘impromptu’ as many people think.
Our job is exactly the same. We want to build a repertoire of engaging and interesting ‘canned answers’ that we know we can count on to get the job done. This repertoire will not only massively improve your confidence levels when walking in for an interview, it will also allow you to…
Skillset #5: Control The Interview
If you’ve been following me for a while you’ll have heard me talk about the importance of ‘controlling the interview’. That doesn’t mean you talk over the judges or simply refuse to answer their questions (you often see politicians doing this).
What it means is that no matter how INANE or CLICHE the questions are, you’re able to answer them in a way that sets you apart from your fellow contestants and identify yourself as a potential titleholder.
In the example below you can see how Miss Earth USA 2021 Marisa Ford (Butler) takes my simple question of ‘how are you’ to highlight how much work she has been doing (highlighting her work ethic), how she thrives under pressure (highlighting her ability to deal with pressure situations as a titleholder), and to throw in a short but sweet story as to how the pageant has affected her social life:
By using your repertoire of canned answers (skillset #4) that were built on a foundation of your talking points (skillset #1), interesting and engaging storytelling (skillset #2), and keeping it relevant (skillset #3), you can easily turn a seemingly innocuous question such as “what’s your favourite colour” into an engaging, insightful, and concise anecdote about your advocacy or your strongest selling points as a contender.
Make no mistake, it does take some practice to link up a seemingly unrelated interview question to one of your canned answers (and it may not always be possible to do so), but the more you practice it, the more natural it’s going to seem.
And, once you’ve put the work in to crafting those canned answers, you’ll be amazed at how easily you’re able to craft quality answers on the spot when presented with a question you didn’t expect (something you won’t get by simply memorising answers in advance).
Here’s another example of controlling the interview, this time from former titleholder and current Director of Miss Delaware USA Vincenza Carrieri-Russo. Note how she takes my simple question about first-time directing and uses it to paint the story of her (massive) pageant experience:
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