Julia Stiles waited 25 years for a rematch with her most famous dance scene. On the October 13 episode of Dancing with the Stars, the actor and her professional partner Ezra Sosa built their jazz routine around the Juilliard audition from the 2001 film Save the Last Dance, and Sean Patrick Thomas, who played her love interest Derek, turned up in the ballroom to watch her do it again.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for 25 years!” Stiles told co-host Julianne Hough after the number. Four judges, guest judge Joe Buck among them, gave the couple 33 out of 40.
Why this callback lands
Ballroom shows trade on memory as much as footwork, and few contestants in a given cast bring a dance scene viewers can picture on cue. Stiles does. Save the Last Dance opened at No. 1 in North America in January 2001 with $27.5 million over its first weekend and went on to $131.5 million worldwide against a $13 million budget. That is roughly $10 back for every dollar spent, the kind of return that turns a mid-priced MTV Films and Paramount release into a sleepover staple for a generation.
Stiles was 19 when it came out, two years after 10 Things I Hate About You and a year before the first Bourne film. The film’s production history says she had no dance background when director Thomas Carter cast her; she trained for two months on the ballet sequences and separately learned hip-hop choreography by Fatima Robinson. In a 2001 interview she said she did all of her own dancing except a few close-ups of feet.
Super Bowl Night, the first theme week in the show’s history built around halftime-show hits, gave her a reason to go back. Sosa set the routine to the Track Masters remix of Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block,” featuring Jadakiss and Styles P, and mixed a chair section, ballet lines and hip-hop phrases, with a solo passage for Stiles in the middle. Thomas appeared behind Sosa with his jacket slung over one shoulder, nodding to the beat, as Derek does while Sara auditions in the film.
Stiles framed the routine as a second attempt rather than a tribute act. “I’m a grown woman, and I feel better in my body and in my skin, and I wanted — I just wanted to be better,” she said after the show. In a video the program posted to Instagram, Thomas said he was “just over the moon to be here to watch Julia do her thing tonight.”
The clip, and the scorecard
The show’s own YouTube channel posted the performance as an 81-second clip late on October 13, Pacific time. By Friday it had passed 1 million views, a big number for a single routine from week five of a season.
The judges were kinder to this version than many critics were to the original. In 2001 the film’s dance sequences took some of its harshest notices, with reviewers calling the dancing mediocre and faulting how the scenes were cut together. This week Bruno Tonioli called it her best dance of the season so far, and Derek Hough brought her in for a hug before the scores came up.
The numbers are more measured. A total of 33 works out to 8.25 per judge on average. That tied Stiles and Sosa with Maura Higgins and with Harry Shum Jr. for fourth place on the night, three points behind co-leaders Jenna Dewan and Ezra Frech, who each scored 36. Dewan has been near the top for weeks; our earlier story on her Toto “Africa” samba shows how quickly the panel can cool on a trained dancer.
The style label drew some pushback as well. One viewer posted on X that “I wouldn’t call this jazz,” while still calling the routine a 10 out of 10. Nostalgia earned the loudest reaction of the night; it did not earn the top score.
The night’s elimination went elsewhere: Guillermo Rodriguez of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and his partner Witney Carson went home after the combined judges’ scores and viewer votes. The remaining 10 couples dance again on Tuesday, October 20, at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC and Disney+, with episodes on Hulu the next day.
Further reading
Image: Peter Kudlacz, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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