Hilaria Baldwin only lasted four episodes on Dancing With the Stars, but her scars will take time to fade.
The yoga instructor, reality star, and wife of Alec Baldwin opened up about her brief, but memorable time on season 34 of the reality competition series on Monday’s episode of Tori Spelling’s MisSPELLING podcast.
“It was actually really, really tight. They made it a little bit too tight on my neck, so I was bruised, too, the next day,” she told the Beverly Hills, 90210 star, who appeared on the previous season of DWTS. Baldwin was recalling her week 1 outfit, a tightly corseted silver and lime green top with a deep V that flowed into a feathered skirt, all supported by a tight strap slung around her neck.
The costume apparently dug into “all my collarbones, the back of my neck, because of how tight the dress was,” Baldwin explained. But that wasn’t all.
Disney/Eric McCandless
“The week afterwards, we did tango, and my elbows, we had to tape them because I was getting this awful pain” because Baldwin’s pro partner, Gleb Savchenko, “threw me around into a trick towards the end.”
Of all of her DWTS outfits, the reality star remembers the last as the worst. That diaphanous, floor-length gown designed to mimic Carrie Fisher’s iconic Princess Leia costume from the original Star Wars trilogy (week 4 was “Disney Night”) “was probably my least favorite,” Baldwin explained, “because it was just so much fabric. It was like, we kept on catching each other on it and made it hard to dance.”
Many viewers expected Baldwin to come back after Disney Night with a fifth outfit, then a sixth, and maybe even make it all the way to the finale, due to her strong performances from week to week, grounded in her college training in ballroom dance. But alas, Baldwin and Savchenko’s quickstep to the “Cantina Band” song from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hop wasn’t stellar enough to save them from elimination.
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Though she left the show empty-handed, Baldwin expressed no regrets, and even spoke enthusiastically about gaining a “lifelong friend” in Savchenko. She also officially joins not just the expansive alumni network of former DWTS competitors, but those who gave it their all, and sustained an injury in the process.
Season 29’s Kaitlyn Bristowe revealed in Sept. that she’s “still suffering years later from cracked ribs and pulling a muscle that was under my ribs” after taking home the gold. Others have complained of breaks, tears, contusions, and concussions. This season alone, Elaine Hendrix suffered a rib injury that momentarily took her out of the competition, and pro Daniella Karagach executed a move in rehearsal that wound up breaking her partner Dylan Efron’s nose.
You can listen to Baldwin’s full appearance on the MisSPELLING podcast above.