LOS ANGELES — Amber Glenn arrived at the Paris Olympics as the first openly LGBTQ+ woman to compete for the United States in figure skating. She left with gold. On Wednesday morning, ABC News reported the 16-celebrity cast for Season 35 of Dancing with the Stars, which premieres September 15 in a format the network has positioned as a two-night event.
The cast is a deliberately layered mix. There is nostalgia: Tatyana Ali, who played Ashley Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air through the show’s entire six-season run, will compete on a floor where results are decided by judges’ scores and audience votes. There is athletic credibility: Ezra Frech, the Paralympic gold medalist and world-record holder who co-founded Angel City Sports to expand competitive opportunities for athletes with disabilities, brings a degree of physical range that producers rarely book without also booking drama. And there is the kind of Hollywood weight that justifies a season’s promotional reach: Julia Stiles, Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated for “Riviera” and recognizable to two generations of moviegoers from “10 Things I Hate About You” and the Bourne franchise, makes her ballroom debut paired with Ezra Sosa.
The two-night premiere, running September 15 and 16 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+, with next-day streaming on Hulu, frames the season as an appointment rather than a weekly habit. That framing is a commercial decision: back-to-back broadcast hours allow ABC to establish which celebrities audiences want to follow before anyone has formed strong enough opinions for voting to become reflexive.
Jenna Dewan, who trained as a professional dancer before crossing into acting with “Step Up” and is currently a series regular on ABC’s “The Rookie,” arrives as the most technically credentialed celebrity competitor. Her pairing with Val Chmerkovskiy, a former champion and the show’s most recognized professional partner, is the kind of booking the production team saves for contestants it expects to define a season. Whether that expectation produces pressure or momentum will be among the first genuine storylines.
Harry Shum Jr. knows his way around a dance floor. His years on “Glee” as Mike Chang were spent in choreographed performance numbers; “Everything Everywhere All at Once” established him as a performer with serious dramatic range. Paired with Jenna Chmerkovskiy, he is one of the few contestants this season who arrives with enough movement background that the traditional early-week learning-curve edit may need to take a different shape.
The casting also reaches into music. Taylor Hanson, one-third of Hanson, the band that defined a significant stretch of late-1990s teen pop and has maintained a devoted following through three decades of continuous touring, represents the production’s willingness to book someone who arrives not with broad current celebrity but with a fanbase that votes. Tyler Cameron, whose trajectory from “The Bachelorette” to real estate entrepreneurship and social media has kept him in consistent entertainment news visibility, is paired with Sharna Burgess, a former champion.
Among the newer additions: Connor Wood, a social media personality who served as an NBC Olympics correspondent; Maura Higgins, whose appearances on “The Traitors” and “Love Island” represent the kind of streaming-era reality visibility the show has begun treating as equivalent to traditional broadcast credentials; Ciara Miller of Bravo’s “Summer House”; and Conner Leavitt, the husband of a “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” star.
This cast arrives against a week of meaningful movement across ABC’s fall lineup. Earlier Tuesday, Sony Pictures Television suspended Wheel of Fortune announcer Jim Thornton and began recasting his role, ending the one continuous voice tying that show’s Seacrest era to its Sajak-era identity. Dancing with the Stars is a separate production, but both are part of the same broadcast conversation ABC is managing heading into September.
The Season 35 cast does not offer an obvious frontrunner with universal momentum. Glenn’s Olympic gold gives her the most credentialed athletic pedigree in the group. Stiles has the longest-running cultural recognition. Dewan has the most applicable skill base. Those three threads will likely shape the first phase of audience voting before the elimination structure compresses the field toward its final form.
What the show does not reveal before a premiere is which of those threads will hold. That is the question the floor answers.
Season 35 of Dancing with the Stars premieres September 15 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+.
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