Anna Delvey did not see her early Dancing With the Stars elimination coming after initial heaps of encouraging praise.
“I thought, like, ‘Well, they were building me up.’ It’s like, ‘Well, only if you smile more, only if you do X, Y, Z, it’s going to be so much better,’” Delvey, 33, recalled during the Saturday, September 28, episode of fellow DWTS contestant Tori Spelling’s “Misspelling” podcast.
Delvey added, “It felt like they put so much effort in trying to get me on the show and make me feel comfortable, just to eliminate me this early. I see it, yeah, like an attempt of an embarrassment for us to get eliminated before Eric [Roberts] or Reginald [VelJohnson] in a dancing competition. Even though in the end it’s not that big of a deal.”
Delvey and Spelling, 51, alongside respective partners Ezra Sosa and Pasha Pashkov, were the first stars eliminated from DWTS season 33.
“It just felt a bit upsetting to me,” Delvey said. “It felt like a waste of time for me to do all this for them to just discard me so easily. I know the show was very excited to have me on, but the large part of the audience is not the people who would usually be excited about me in general.”
She added, “I never had high expectations for [the] show for myself.”
Delvey further revealed that she later faced a lot of “negativity” during the first two weeks, adding that it felt like show fans “just decided to hate us.” (Sosa, 23, previously revealed on a podcast earlier this month that he found Delvey sobbing backstage after the first live show garnered negative fan reactions.)
“I don’t think I’ve done the worst job on the show,” Delvey stressed, citing that she “improved” between her two DWTS routines. “We got eliminated and people who were, I think, below us got to stay on the show and makes it a bit sus for a show that’s called Dancing With the Stars, and not like Gossiping With the Stars or Making Friends With the Stars.”
According to Delvey, both she and Spelling were stronger dancers than Roberts, 68, and VelJohnson, 72. Spelling, however, was grateful for her transformative experience and didn’t foster resentment at the DWTS team.
“I had no expectations and then once I got in it, though, I got a little competitive because I was like, ‘I’m starting to do this and I’m actually good at it,’” Spelling recalled on Saturday before addressing Delvey’s performance. “I mean you had to know, like once you were doing rehearsals, you were [improving] because you have beautiful lines.”
Delvey cited her ballet training — she took lessons as a child in Russia — for her dance experience but wishes her ballroom frame was better.
Dancing With the Stars airs simultaneously on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET. Episodes are available to stream on Hulu and Disney+ the next day.
