Julianne Hough couldn’t afford rent before Dancing with the Stars

Julianne Hough took a job on Dancing with the Stars because she couldn’t afford to pay her rent.
The 37-year-old star had left Utah for California in her late teens to try and pursue a career in Hollywood but after a string of disappointing auditions, she found herself struggling for money – only for her fortunes to change when she was invited to be a professional dancer on the fourth season of the celebrity Latin and ballroom contest.
She reflected in a video shared to Instagram over the weekend: “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.
“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.”
Julianne shared an apartment with a number of models and though it was “really fun”, their experiences were very different.
She said: “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.”
After six months, the blonde beauty could no longer pay her rent.
She said: “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.
“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.”
Julianne’s career then took off, as she signed a record deal as a country musician and starred alongside Tom Cruise in 2012’s Rock of Ages, but as her professional life soared, her personal life fell apart, with her marriage to Brooks Laich ending in 2020 after three years.
She reflected: “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.
“That was very much like probably the darkest time.”
Getting through the tough time was “a process and it was timing” but Julianne – who is now DWTS co-host alongside Alfonso Ribiero – learned to look after herself by boosting her friendships.
She said: “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.
“I think that the minute you feel isolated or lonely, the minute you can think about serving someone else.
“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.”