After a shocking penultimate episode reveal, there will be five couples competing for the Len Goodman Mirrorball Trophy in Dancing with the Stars Season 33 amid the 2024 TV schedule. Witney Carson will be present alongside her dance partner and former NFL star Danny Amendola, who has shocked viewers a few times this season. Pro athletes are often great on the show, but how do they differ from actors? Well, Carson spoke to CinemaBlend about whether that's the case.
As we prepare for the three-hour finale, I was lucky enough to speak with Witney Carson about a number of topics. Our chat eventually turned to the difference between working with athletes vs. actors. She's worked with both and, while I wondered which she'd sooner have with the 2025 TV schedule rolling around, she mentioned the big advantage of working with a guy like Danny Amendola:
I think athletes are very much, like, put your head down, focus, get the play done, get the job done. Work as hard as you can. They're very, very coachable. They're like sponges and work extremely hard to get something right. They're a little bit of a perfectionist, If it's a good football player, which I've had, they really just wanna do well in everything that they do. I've been lucky with the actors knowing that they do work really hard. But I think the athletes' mentality is just crazy that you cannot teach.
I can totally see what Witney Carson's saying, especially after seeing Danny Amendola top the leaderboard one week with a performance that made him my favorite to win Dancing with the Stars this time around. He's been great at performing incredibly difficult moves that an amateur shouldn't be able to pull off, as evidenced by the fails on his viral Tiktok leg pull.
That's not to say Amendola or NFL veteran Von Miller, who Witney Carson previously worked with, don't struggle. Carson also told me about the downside of working with an athlete and what they have more trouble grasping than, say current co-host DWTS host Alfonso Ribeiro did when he won with her back in Season 19:
You cannot teach performance. I haven't had to really teach performance because I've had so many actors and performers that were so natural at that. Um And now it's kind of the flip side where I've had to now like, teach somebody how to perform, which has been interesting.
I guess, in hindsight, it's kind of obvious that an actor may be better at the performance part of a dance than mastering the actual steps of a routine. Reginald Vel Johnson had people hyped with his Die Hard tribute performance, but it wasn't the dance steps that wowed the crowd. I don't think Danny Amendola could've brought the same emotional energy to a dance where he essentially did nothing afterward, and that's a credit to acting.
With all of this said, I'm eager to see if Witney Carson and Danny Amendola win and net the pro dancer her second Mirrorball victory since joining DWTS. She's come painfully close to winning a couple of times since her first win but told CinemaBlend she's more focused on the quality of performances than earning a win. That said, winning would be great, and I'm sure there's no shortage of viewers who will be rooting for her and Danny Amendola on finale night.
The Dancing with the Stars Season 33 finale will air on ABC and Disney+ on Tuesday, November 26th, at 8:00 p.m. ET. I'm ready for a competitive night of dancing, and I think we might be set for one of the most unpredictable nights the show has seen in some time.
