Every season, Dancing with the Stars sets up its professional dancers with a different type of celebrity, coming from different age groups, skill levels and fields. Some of these pairings make for magic on the small screen. Some of them, however, are a total nightmare. This week, we learned which contestant professional dancer Cheryl Burke especially hated during her time on ABC’s reality competition series. That person was none other than former Beverly Hills, 90210 actor Ian Ziering. Here’s the really blunt comment she made in a recent interview about her time on the show:
It made me want to slit my wrists. I was like crying to executives. I was like is there any way to please to just eliminate us? They’re like we can’t. We can’t do that and I swear, every time I asked, we just kept going. We would last till the end.
If you can remember way back to Season 4, Cheryl Burke and Ian Ziering were pretty big competitors on Dancing with the Stars. While the couple did not end up winning the series, they stuck it out for quite some time, with the pair eventually nabbing the fourth place spot in the season, getting eliminated just before the finale. But Burke recently recorded an interview for the Allegedly podcast (via TMZ) which goes live on Tuesday where she explained that things were so bad between herself and Ian Ziering that she basically asked the production team to just eliminate them. Talk about competence in the face of adversity.
Honestly, her distaste for the actor is palpable. She even goes on a side rant complaining about how he pronounces his name.
My least favorite [partner] would be Ian Ziering. The fact that his name is not EE-AN and it's EYE-AN makes me want to throw up.
Obviously, Ian Ziering was a good Dancing with the Stars competitor. He was paired up with Cheryl Burke, who is one of the most notable professional dancers on the series and they were able to make magic on the dance floor, as seen, below.
Behind-the-scenes, he was apparently intense, and Cheryl Burke says it was simply difficult to deal with his personality day in and day out. It was probably a relief when they eventually got eliminated.
Cheryl Burke isn't the only professional dancer who has ever dealt with partner issues on Dancing with the Stars. Beyond professional dancers speaking out about past experiences, ABC also airs clips from the week in training. There are plenty of celebrity/professional pairings that just aren't on the same wavelength, despite the show's attempts to match people up who would be good fits. It's part of the fun of watching to see how the pairings shake out.
You can catch new episodes of Dancing with the Stars on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET, only on ABC. In addition, here's what other programs will hit the TV schedule this summer.
