Laurie Hernandez: 'Dancing With the Stars' Celeb Responds To Val Chmerkovskiy Tearing Up [VIDEO]
Laurie Hernandez made just about everyone cry with her touching performance during last week's Dancing With the Stars, and now she's speaking out about it.
Hernandez and her pro partner Val Chmerkovskiy performed a Viennese waltz to "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory during last Monday's show. The magical moment concluded with the judges giving them a perfect 30 out of 30.
This routine notably made Chmerkovskiy cry during rehearsals, with the pro admitting that he just didn't want to let her down. So what did Hernandez think of the response to her dance? The 16-year-old wrote about it in her Us Weekly blog.
"I couldn't believe Val cried. Everybody said, 'We've never ever seen him cry on this show before!' It was crazy! I didn't realize how much of an effect I had on him. Plus the song and the dance were really pretty, so that made it extra emotional," she wrote.
"It's great to be able to be able to touch his heart like that," the Olympian continued. "It makes me feel really good. I'm not saying that his crying makes me feel good, but the fact that he cares so much about dancing and handing down his passions and his experiences to me, it's really nice. I'm so glad we're still getting along even though we've been traveling together and spending so much time together. We don't fight because don't have anything to fight about. He's like a big brother to me."
This is Hernandez and Chmerkovskiy's second perfect-scoring dance of the season, and she hopes to achieve perfection in all of her upcoming dances. She admitted that she's felt the pressure to perform at such a high level, but the benefits are ultimately worth it.
"I like getting a perfect score because that means we did the dance totally perfect and there were no flaws! I was so happy. Every week I hope for 10s, but the main goal is just to go out there and do a perfect dance and do as best as we can, and if the dance feels good, which it did and it felt beautiful, then I'm sure that the scores would come."
Dancing With the Stars airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
