Hilaria Baldwin is detailing her journey to the Dancing With the Stars season 34 ballroom — and debunking cohost Julianne Hough’s theory about how she landed on the show.
“I heard from Julianne Hough that you manifested this,” host Amanda Hirsch said on the Tuesday, October 7 episode of her “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast, to which Hilaria, 41, replied, “I love Julianne. I don’t know where she got that from.”
Hilaria continued, “I loved it. Because I saw that too, and I was like, ‘That’s not how it happened.’ But I love that story, I actually love that story. I wish I had manifested it … I guess it depends on which way you look at it.”
During a September appearance on the “Chicks in the Office” podcast, Julianne, 37, claimed that Hilaria’s TikTok videos of her dancing before the show was a “campaign.” Julianne added, “And she won. She was doing that all separately. She was not a part of the show until later. She was campaigning and she got on. That’s awesome.”
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Hilaria, for her part, acknowledged that she did initially begin thinking about Dancing With the Stars after launching her TikTok account.
“I’m brand new to TikTok. And I’m trying to figure it out. There’s a lot of dancing and lip-syncing. I started doing the trends and some of them are samba trends,” Hilaria recalled. “And I danced a million years ago. And people start writing to me, ‘You should be on Dancing With the Stars, you should be on Dancing With the Stars.’ Because I danced before, my connection with ballroom is a little painful because I broke my hip and I didn’t ever dance again.”
She continued, “So I’m always a fan of the show, I get excited to kind of see it, but I haven’t really focused on who the contestants are. And I didn’t realize that they let dancers on the show. So I always thought this thing like, ‘I can’t do this show, that’s not the right fit for me, it’s people who’ve never danced before.’ … It just felt like this was probably not a place where I belong and for me, who has tremendous issues in belonging, I was like, ‘I don’t want to go into a place where I don’t belong.’”
Hilaria claimed that she received a call from the show “out of blue” in late August. While she was hesitant to accept the offer at first, Hilaria shared it was “a few days later” that she was “on a plane” en route to Los Angeles for the show.
As Hilaria strives to be the latest mirrorball trophy champion with partner Gleb Savchenko, she has embraced the journey.
“This is a job,” Hilaria exclusively told Us Weekly after the September 30 episode. “This is an experience where you work every day, and tomorrow, at 5 o’clock in the morning, we are off to work. I kid you not, [we’re] off to work. And it’s wonderful work, but it means I am not here to have people, I don’t know the nice way to say, shine my shoes.”
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
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