Julia Stiles took 16 out of 30 on Dancing With the Stars Viral Hits Night — so how does a bottom-half score not send you home?
Dancing With the Stars ran Viral Hits Night on Tuesday, and Julia Stiles came out of it with 16 points from a possible 30 — joint second-lowest on the board. On this show that is not the same thing as being in trouble, and the reason sits in the half of the result the cameras never show you.
Tuesday’s theme on Dancing With the Stars was Viral Hits Night, the couples dancing to songs and moments that had taken over the internet. It was the third episode of season 35 but only the second week of actual competition, after the premiere was spread across two nights. Stiles and her partner Ezra Sosa came away with 16.
The board, as The Hollywood Reporter logged it through the night, put Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy on top and left Giada De Laurentiis at the bottom.
- Jenna Dewan and Val Chmerkovskiy — 21/30
- Ciara Miller and Brandon Armstrong — 18/30
- Jackson Olson and Emma Slater — 18/30
- Julia Stiles and Ezra Sosa — 16/30, level with Tyler Cameron and Sharna Burgess
- Giada De Laurentiis and Alan Bersten — 12/30
Why 16 out of 30 is not a verdict
The judges only own half of it. Elimination goes to the couple with the lowest combined total of judges’ scores and viewer votes, which means a middling paddle can be papered over entirely by an audience that likes you. Voting runs live during the East Coast broadcast and closes shortly after the last dance of the night — so a West Coast viewer has a window of roughly an hour and three quarters, from 5 p.m. Pacific, and then it is shut.
That is the part first-time viewers keep tripping over: the number the judges hold up is an opinion, and the number that actually removes people is arithmetic done after the credits.
There is a second thing catching people out this season, and it is a plumbing problem rather than a scoring one. Season 35 goes out Tuesdays at 8 p.m. as a simulcast on ABC and Disney+, with the episode landing on Hulu the following day. Simulcast means the Disney+ feed runs at broadcast time, not on demand — open it late and there is nothing to catch up on until Hulu has it.
What Stiles did before the ballroom
She is 45, born in New York City in March 1981, and she has been working since she was a child — stage debut at 11 with the experimental off-Broadway company La MaMa, professional jobs and commercials by 12. The detail that matters in a dance competition: she was put into modern dance lessons as a girl, before any of the acting.
The role most people mean when they recognise her is Kat Stratford in 10 Things I Hate About You, opposite Heath Ledger, released in spring 1999 by Touchstone. It reached cinemas days after her eighteenth birthday; she was 17 when it was shot. Two years later came Save the Last Dance, which was also, as it happens, about dancing. Then Nicky Parsons across the Bourne films, and a run on Dexter — a CV that, as another actor’s week has just demonstrated, does not by itself keep the work coming.
Still in the competition: Tatyana Ali, Tyler Cameron, Giada De Laurentiis, Jenna Dewan, Ezra Frech, Amber Glenn, Taylor Hanson, Maura Higgins, Ciara Miller, Jackson Olson, Guillermo Rodriguez, Harry Shum Jr., Julia Stiles and Connor Wood.
Two eliminations have already happened this season, split across the two premiere nights: Conner Leavitt went on the men’s night, Sarah Jane Nader on the women’s.
So the score that went up on screen for Stiles on Tuesday settles nothing on its own. The half that decides it was cast by phone and app while the show was still on air, and it does not get read out.
