Jenna Dewan Faces DWTS Backlash — and Her Response Is Smarter Than the Criticism

Jenna Dewan Faces DWTS Backlash — and Her Response Is Smarter Than the Criticism

When Dancing With the Stars Season 35 cast was announced, one name caused an immediate stir: Jenna Dewan. The Step Up actress and former Janet Jackson backup dancer is, by any reasonable measure, a professional dancer. So why is she standing in line with celebrities who’ve never stepped on a ballroom floor? That’s the question that set social media alight — and Dewan has a genuinely persuasive answer.

“I do not know how to ballroom dance,” she told Entertainment Weekly, and the distinction matters more than it might seem.

Two Different Languages, Not One Dance

The backlash is easy to understand. DWTS is built on a simple premise: take a celebrity with zero dance experience, pair them with a world-class pro, and watch them stumble toward the Mirrorball Trophy. It’s the gap between contestant and pro that gives the show its drama. When one contestant already has decades of professional choreography experience, the gap shrinks — or so the argument goes.

But Dewan’s response cuts through the noise with a point that’s both technically correct and surprisingly humble. “Let’s be clear. It’s two different languages,” she said. “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.”

She’s right. Ballroom isn’t hip-hop, it isn’t contemporary, and it isn’t the street-style choreography that made Step Up a cultural touchstone. It’s a completely different vocabulary — frame, posture, connection, lead-and-follow mechanics that don’t translate from a movie dancefloor. The habits that make someone an elite performer in one style can actively get in the way when the style changes. Dewan knows this. She said ballroom “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.”

That’s not a celebrity trying to talk their way out of an unfair advantage. That’s a dancer who understands the craft well enough to know where the boundaries are.

Val Chmerkovskiy Sees the Real Stakes

Dewan’s pro, Val Chmerkovskiy, has been on DWTS for years and has seen every angle of the show’s celebrity dynamics. His take on the controversy is measured and frank: “First of all, it’s naive to think that this show is just about dance. It’s about the human experience and the human journey and how much you’re willing to reveal yourself. Dance is a vehicle for us to find out more about these people — and I think that’s our advantage.”

He didn’t pretend the casting doesn’t create a different dynamic. “She comes in with incredible talent,” Chmerkovskiy said, “but with great talent comes incredible expectation — that’s my challenge.” That’s the real story here. The bar is higher, the expectations are greater, and the margin for a messy first week is thinner. For viewers, that’s not a reason to tune out — it’s a reason to lean in.

Chmerkovskiy’s philosophy is exactly what makes DWTS work when it works: “The way I approach things is that you’re only as good as the thing that you’ve never done, so I’m going to push her and push us to showcase to the world something they haven’t seen from her yet.” Dewan jumped in with a quick “Many years ago!” — a reminder that her professional peak is well behind her, and the vulnerability of starting over in a new discipline is real.

The Rest of the Cast Tells the Same Story

Season 35’s full lineup tells you everything about why the casting conversation is interesting. Alongside Dewan: Julia Stiles (the 10 Things I Hate About You actress who did her own skate-dancing in Save the Last Dance), Harry Shum Jr. (the Step Up co-star who literally danced his way into pop culture fame), Tatyana Ali (Fresh Prince’s Ashley, who’s been dancing on screen since childhood), and Giada De Laurentiis, who’s a television chef by trade but has been in front of cameras for two decades. This isn’t a random assortment of people plucked from a subreddit. There’s a through-line: people who’ve spent their careers in physical performance, even if it’s not ballroom.

That actually makes Season 35 fascinating from a competition standpoint. You’ve got people who understand spacing, timing, performance quality, and how to take direction — all the things that separate a contender from someone who’s just showing up. The question isn’t whether Dewan has an unfair advantage. The question is which of these contestants has spent enough time in front of a mirror to adapt fast.

Why This Controversy Actually Matters

DWTS has never had a clean, published standard for how much dance background is too much. Over the years, the show has hosted Olympic athletes, musical theatre performers, gymnasts, and professional dancers who somehow ended up in the celebrity category. The rules have always bent. What makes this season different is that Dewan — one of the most credentialed dancers in the cast — is willing to talk about the nuance publicly instead of just showing up and hoping no one notices.

That honesty changes the framing. Instead of a talent-up contest where everyone pretends they’re starting from zero, viewers get a more honest competition: people with different backgrounds navigating the same syllabus, figuring out how much of their old training helps and how much gets in the way. It’s messier. It’s more interesting. And Dewan’s willingness to say “I have to unlearn things” makes her a more compelling contestant, not less.

Season 35 premiered September 15 on ABC and streams on Disney+. If the first few weeks go anything like Dewan and Chmerkovskiy are describing, the result won’t be a professional dancing circles around amateurs — it’ll be a genuinely different kind of DWTS season, one where the elephant in the room gets named and then gets to work.

— Interested in how reality competition casting shapes a season? The Step Up franchise defined a generation of dance-film choreography — check out our coverage of Step Up, Step Up Revolution, and the TV series Step Up: High Water. And for more on the performers who bridge professional dance and screen stardom, see our profile of Janet Jackson, the icon Dewan spent her early career backing up.