'Dancing With the Stars' Paige VanZant: UFC Fighter Performing 'Toy Story' Inspired Dance Next? [VIDEO]
Paige VanZant has had an interesting run so far on Dancing With the Stars compared to her fellow celebrities.
VanZant's DWTS partner Mark Ballas had to sit out of Week 2 due to a back injury, with dance troupe member Alan Bersten stepping in in his place. Ballas is now back and working with VanZant, but he had to coach from the sidelines through most of last week.
"He did most of the teaching from a chair," VanZant said in a new interview with MMA Junkie. "It wasn't until Saturday that he really stepped in to do the dance with me. Until Saturday, I was doing it with Alan (Bersten) most of the time, and then Mark would step in when he could. It was up to Sunday and Monday for us to get it down together. It was definitely a little scary going into it, only rehearsing with Mark for not very long. But he did a good job with all of it, and hopefully he'll be better and can dance full time (in practice) this week. I think Mark's still undecided exactly what he's doing (with rehearsals with the injury), so I feel a little in the dark with a lot of it. But whatever happens, I'll be comfortable with whoever I'm dancing with, or whoever I'm learning the dance with. It'll be OK."
VanZant and Ballas' creative pasodoble, which was made to look very similar to a UFC fight, received high praise from the judges, though Len Goodman criticized them for not having enough traditional pasodoble.
"For me, I was just really excited about how the night went, happy with our scores and happy with not being eliminated. Mark said it was possible that (Len) could say that. I thought there was a lot of pasodoble in there. But it was definitely (a) new and different (take on the dance), and Len is obviously a very traditional person. We're dancing in a cage - it could've been just really foreign to him," she noted.
VanZant is now one of 10 celebrities left in the competition heading into next week's Disney Night. The fighter spoke about what's ahead for this dance:
"I'm a Disney person. I love Disney. I wanted to do Alice in Wonderland, but (Mark) did it last year (with Willow Shields). So he came up with the idea of doing Toy Story. We'll be doing Toy Story, and he chose the quickstep," she teased.
Dancing With the Stars airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
