LOS ANGELES — Julia Stiles spent her breakthrough years playing a ballet dancer who had to learn hip-hop. Harry Shum Jr. spent six seasons as Glee’s resident street dancer, performing alongside professional choreographers for an audience of millions. Jenna Dewan toured as Janet Jackson’s backup dancer before she was anyone’s idea of a television celebrity. On Tuesday, all three of them compete against each other on Dancing With the Stars.
Season 35 of the ABC competition series premieres September 15 in a two-night event, with the second episode airing Wednesday, September 16, and the Season 35 cast revealed September 2 on Good Morning America represents something the show has not quite assembled before: a group of celebrities who, on the whole, already know how to move.
Dancing With the Stars is built on a specific promise. The spectacle is of a non-dancer learning discipline they did not previously have: an NFL quarterback memorizing footwork, a sitcom comedian navigating a Viennese waltz, a reality TV contestant discovering rhythm for the first time. The drama comes from the gap between what they were before the show and what they become in the ballroom. That gap closes considerably when the opening cast includes a woman who studied classical ballet for more than a decade before her first SAG card, a man whose most famous role required him to perform choreography alongside professionals for six years, and another woman who has a professional touring career in dance on her resume before she had a television credit at all.
Stiles, who trained in ballet throughout her childhood before Save the Last Dance made her recognizable in 2001, will compete with partner Ezra Sosa. Shum Jr., who played Mike Chang in Glee from 2009 to 2015, a character whose defining quality was extraordinary dancing rather than the academic ambitions his parents kept insisting on, is paired with Jenna Johnson. Dewan, currently starring in ABC’s The Rookie, built her early career touring as a backup dancer and enters the ballroom with Val Chmerkovskiy, one of the show’s most decorated professional partners, beside her.
Then there is Amber Glenn, the Olympic gold medalist figure skater whose background on ice gives her a body awareness and performance training that transfers more directly to ballroom competition than most celebrity starting points allow. Glenn won gold at the Paris 2024 Games in pairs figure skating. She arrives Tuesday with a professional movement education that simply lived in a different discipline until now.
The tension between both halves of this cast will be one of the more interesting variables of the premiere. Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough return as co-hosts, with judges Carrie Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli, and Derek Hough applying the same scoring rubric to a cast with widely divergent starting points. Hough, who has been vocal over his judging career about the distinction between natural athletic grace and trained technical foundation, faces a cast this season where both are present simultaneously.
What the judges do with that distinction matters because of how the show scores. Dancing With the Stars has historically rewarded progress over polish: the combined scoring system and the audience vote together tend to lift the celebrity who improved the most, not necessarily the one who danced best. That dynamic creates a structural disadvantage for Stiles, Shum Jr., and Dewan: if they begin at a technical 8 and improve to a 9, they may score lower overall than a celebrity who starts at a 5 and reaches a 7, regardless of which performance was objectively more accomplished. Whether the judges acknowledge that differential or apply the same standard to everyone will shape what kind of show Season 35 becomes.
The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the full cast pairings, which ABC announced September 2 on Good Morning America. The premiere airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET, simultaneously on ABC and Disney+, with Wednesday’s second night following at the same time. Both nights are simulcast live; next-day streaming will be available on Hulu.
The two-night premiere unfolds the same week the Emmy Awards ceremony airs Sunday on NBC, hosted by Mariska Hargitay, with Hacks entering its final season with a record 24 nominations as the dominant comedy story of the awards cycle. The DWTS premiere five days later poses a different kind of television question: not which of this year’s best performances will be recognized, but whether the best dancer in the room can actually win a show that was never quite designed for them.
