Julianne Hough is opening up about life in L.A. before she joined the hit reality dance competition, Dancing with the Stars.
“I grew up in Utah. I’m the baby of five and actually became the youngest and only American to ever win the World Championship in ballroom and Latin dancing,” Hough, 37, explained in a video shared via Instagram on Saturday, September 20. “At 15 years old, I was like, dance is not the only thing for me. I want to be an actress. I want to be a singer. I want to go to Hollywood.”
So Hough headed to Los Angeles, where she shared an apartment with a few women working as models, which she described as “really fun” because “they would wake up at four o’clock in the afternoon and get $12,000 checks in the mail and I was getting $33 overdraft fees and hustling my butt, just trying to go to central casting and go on every audition that I could think of.”
Hough went on to explain that she hit a tough spot six months after she moved, and could no longer pay her rent.
“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’ And then because of my experience as a ballroom and Latin dancer, Dancing with the Stars was a new show, [and] the producers of the show asked me if I would be a dancer on the actual TV show,” she continued. “I was like, okay, I’ll do it. I ended up doing the show and won my first two seasons back to back. It was like a ripple effect. I felt like the stars were aligned.”
Her career took off, and Hough soon signed a record deal as a country music artist and starred alongside Tom Cruise in 2012’s Rock of Ages.
Despite her career skyrocketing, her personal life behind the scenes was falling apart.
“My dogs were killed by coyotes. My marriage started unraveling, but my career, my friend group, everything that I had known really started taking a different shape,” Hough explained. “That was very much like probably the darkest time.”
Getting through those experiences “was a process and it was timing,” she continued. “You can’t rush feeling, you can’t rush the timeframe that you need to go through to learn a lesson. But I will say that I poured my energy into self-care. I poured my energy into things that brought me joy, which are friendships and really invested into others.”
Hough reflected on how she best overcomes feelings of loneliness.
“I think that the minute you feel isolated or lonely, the minute you can think about serving someone else,” she added. “It brings you so much joy and momentum and literally changes the frequency and vibration in your whole body. But it’s a journey and it’s a process and it doesn’t happen overnight.”
Hough joined Dancing with the Stars as a professional dancer during the show’s fourth season when she was 18. She is currently the show’s cohost, alongside Alfonso Ribiero.
Dancing with the Stars airs on ABC on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET, and steams the next day on Hulu and Disney+.
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