Samantha Jade reveals why she turned down Dancing With The Stars 'multiple times'

She’s arguably one of the best performers on this year’s season of Dancing With The Stars, but it turns out Samantha Jade almost didn’t appear on the reality show. The ARIA award-winning singer-songwriter admitted to Yahoo Lifestyle in 2022 following her stint on The Celebrity Apprentice that she had been asked to take part in the dancing competition “multiple times” but repeatedly turned it down.

“I've been asked to do them all,” she said at the time, listing I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, The Masked Singer and Dancing With The Stars as shows she kept saying ‘no’ to.

Fast forward two years and Samantha is one of the favourites to take home the coveted Mirror Ball trophy alongside her dance partner Gustavo Viglio. Speaking to Yahoo Lifestyle about her decision to finally appear on the long-running series, the hitmaker admits that the reason why she never said ‘yes’ is because she was “scared”.

“I think they asked me last November and I was kind of like, ‘Oh, I'm not sure’ again and then took ages to say yes, and my manager was like, ‘What is it? What are you scared of? What is the thing?’,” she reflects. “I think I was like, ‘Oh no, I won't be good at it, it'll be too hard’, and putting it in that basket of the ‘too hard’ thing. And then I was like, why am I doing that? Like, how fun to learn a new skill as well?”

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Samantha adds that she was keen to do something outside of her comfort zone and switch up her routine, saying: “When you get to a certain age you don't do things that scare you anymore. You’ve got your little setups, you've got your life, you know what you can do.

“And I was like, that's not a good thing. I want to do something that scares me and gives me that 'Ooh, I'm nervous to do this’ feeling. And what I wanted from the experience is exactly what I got. The first week I was like, ‘What have I done? Oh my gosh, this is so hard!’. But it was such a great experience, I loved it.”

Samantha Jade reveals 'most challenging' part of the competition

While Samantha admits she had an advantage coming into the competition as a full-time performer, she says her experience on Dancing With The Stars was much harder than she could’ve ever anticipated.

“I don't have stage fright, I perform, I’ve danced before in my shows, but ballroom and Latin dancing are like another level,” she details.

“Even my dancers who dance for me were like, ‘Oh, we can't do ballroom and Latin, it’d be like starting from scratch’, because all the techniques are so different from anything I do in my shows. So I had to really unlearn a lot of things, which was interesting.”

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She also reveals that the “most challenging” part of the competition was that the show’s judges and her dance partner were aware she danced in her shows so she was “pushed really hard”.

“I was up for the challenge, but I think Gustavo knew. He was like, ‘Okay, I can do more with you so we're going to do crazy lifts and we're going to really work on technique and we're going to get it perfect’,” she remarks.

“But it was great, it really challenged me. I would come home and my feet were bleeding, I had bruises everywhere, but it was so worth it because I was like, I'm in this. And if I do something, I go for it, and I felt so good at the end because I was like, I gave this my all.”

Dancing With The Stars continues Sunday 7pm on Channel 7 and 7Plus

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