We Already Know How America Voted in One Important Contest. Unfortunately, the Wrong Woman Lost.

Fame Julia Stiles Had Her Last Dance The millennial-favorite actress does not need me to be proud of her Dancing With the Stars performance, but I can’t help it. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Heather Schwedel? Nov 03, 20265:29 PM Christopher Willard/ABC/Disney Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Though I’m as interested as everyone else to see how this Election Day shakes out, the contest I was watching most closely this year, the one I felt most personally invested in, was over before the polls even opened on Tuesday. And what’s worse is: America definitely made the wrong decision. I am speaking, of course, of the end of Julia Stiles’ run on Dancing With the Stars. Stiles was voted out after eight weeks on Monday night’s show (rescheduled from its usual Tuesday slot to make room for, sigh, midterm results). I knew that her time was probably coming to an end and that she didn’t have much of a chance of winning against a very talented lineup of competitors this season, but I’m still a little bit gutted. That’s a testament to how incredibly fun Stiles’ turn on the show has been. Though I was an occasional watcher earlier in the show’s 35(!)-season run, I haven’t been a regular DWtS viewer in a long time. That is, until the younger-viewer-driven renaissance the show has been experiencing over the past few seasons pulled me back in and I decided to tune in this fall to watch stars like Summer House’s Ciara Miller and The Traitors’ Maura Higgins, both of whom are exactly the kind of buzzy reality-show personalities whose casting has helped turn the show into a hit with Gen Z. Stiles was probably less of a get for Gen Z audiences and more of a pander to millennials like me, and sure enough, when I saw that she was on board too, it was all the more reason to watch. Stiles has a unique relationship to dancing, in that she is heavily associated with it thanks to a couple of her most famous roles, but she never actually trained as a dancer or considered herself much of one. Her performance as a high school ballerina who dips her toe into hip-hop in 2001’s Save the Last Dance is millennial canon, but a body double did much of the choreography that appeared in the film. Though it’s memorable, the dancing in that movie, particularly in the Juilliard audition scene, hasn’t been universally praised; while some look back on it fondly, it’s also easy to mock as clumsy and dated. Another of Stiles’ best-known dancing credits, such as it is, is a short scene from 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You in which she dances on a table at a high school rager. You have to admit, it was an amusing proposition to see if the girl who so memorably drunk-acted her way through thrusting to a Biggie song could handle a ballroom dancing competition 25 years later. In other words, Stiles had something to prove. And it endeared her to me further that she cared enough to do it on national TV. She isn’t as visible these days as she was during her late-’90s, early-2000s peak, though it’s always a thrill to see her, especially in a movie like Hustlers, which feels directly pitched at the same women who grew up watching her onscreen. Still, even with its newfound popularity, she might be a little too famous for a show like Dancing With the Stars, which made it all the more charming that she agreed to be on it. She approached the show seriously and almost studiously each week, seemingly earnestly and nervously wanting to do her best. During dances, she was often more likely to be wearing a look of deep concentration on her face than a performer’s hammy smile. Unlike some competitors who seemed capable of letting loose and just having fun with it, Stiles was trying, hard, and that too appealed to me. When the judges critiqued her, she sometimes looked genuinely crestfallen. Though Stiles referenced her movie career in small ways in her first few performances on the show, the high points of her DWtS run surely came in Weeks 5 and 6, when her dances essentially served as extended tributes to Save the Last Dance and 10 Things. After re-creating the StLD audition scene, complete with Stiles, God help us, dapping up her partner, the next week, Stiles did an emotional performance to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” which she dedicated to the late Heath Ledger, her 10 Things co-star. When some of the movie’s cast members—including Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Gabrielle Union—joined her on the floor at the end of the tribute, it was a truly touching moment. Maybe you could criticize these choices as self-indulgent or even pandering, but they felt completely earned to me. She was telling her life story through dance, in a way that reminded me of a Taylor Swift concert, where fans briefly inhabit a 3D world of shared references. Julia Stiles does not need me to be proud of her, but I can’t help it—I was and am. Her journey on the show reminded me of that old MTV reality show Made, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for teenagers that was frequently silly but occasionally transcendent. Watching an actress I loved as a teenager gain confidence through dancing sounds like a cliché, but what can I say? It surprised me how much I enjoyed watching that particular cliché play out over the course of eight weeks. Perhaps it was hard to know where to go from there, after she had used up her best material, and I knew in my heart that Stiles was not going to beat Jenna Dewan or Harry Shum Jr., both of whom are competing in the show this season, despite having professional dance backgrounds. But I was hoping she might get another few weeks. Sadly, it was not to be. But it doesn’t matter, not really. Julia Stiles already lived out her own teenage-dance movie fantasy, where the journey is more important than the destination, and we all got to watch. Celebrities Movies TV Reality TV Millennials