‘Dancing With the Stars’ Judge Carrie Ann Inaba Defends Jenna Dewan Amid Casting Backlash

Dancing With the Stars fans have a lot of thoughts about Jenna Dewan being cast on season 35 thanks to her background as a professional dancer, and judge Carrie Ann Inaba is speaking out.

Chatting to Entertainment Weekly about both Jenna Dewan and Julia Stiles’ past as dancers, she said, “What’s difficult—and I don’t think people realize this—is when you go from being a jazz dancer or a hip-hop dancer or all the other forms of dancing [to ballroom], the weight placement is so different. It’s weird because your body has memory, so it remembers how to dance, and it thinks it already knows how to do these moves, but it doesn’t. It takes a lot of time to un-train the body to put your weight on the front more over your toes instead of back and down and grounded. It’s not as easy as people think.”

Carrie Ann added that Julia and Jenna “have an advantage in some ways because they’ve got the rhythm and they’ve got the musicality and they know how to dance. They know how to learn choreography and remember choreography. [But] it’s been a few years since they’ve all danced, right?”

Jenna recently spoke about backlash to her casting, telling Entertainment Weekly, “I do not know how to ballroom dance. Let’s be clear. It’s two different languages. There’s parts of my dance training that’s helpful, obviously. I’ve learned choreography, I can perform, but there is a certain sense of unlearning for me. It’s a new technique, brand new technique. It almost threw me off initially because I had to unlearn a lot of—I don’t want to say bad habits—but just habits of the style that I’m used to.”

Reminder that Jenna was in the very dance-centric Step Up movies and was also a backup dancer for Janet Jackson, while Julia Stiles was in the similarly dance-heavy Save the Last Dance. Jenna’s partnered with Valentin Chmerkovskiy on DWTS, while Julia’s partnered with Ezra Sosa.