While appearing on Sherri Shepherd’s eponymous talk show this week, actor Jaleel White, most well-known for starring as Steve Urkel on Family Matters for nine seasons, revealed an awful thing that happened to him while competing on Dancing With the Stars in 2012.
The topic came up because White and Shepherd actually competed on the same season of the long-running dancing competition show. They were on season 14 — Shepherd and her partner Val Chmerkovskiy were eliminated in week 4, and White and his partner Kym Johnson were eliminated in week 7.
White and Shepherd both agree that Dancing With the Stars is “crazy,” and they laughed about how much weight they lost on the show.
“I lost 16 pounds!” said White, to which Shepherd replied with a boisterous laugh, “I went down from size 14 to a size 6. As soon as they voted me out, I went right back up to a 14!”
But in all seriousness, White said that he was dealing with some major life changes outside of the show. He was going through a split from then-girlfriend Bridget Hardy, which was complicated because they shared daughter Samaya, who wasn’t even a year old when they split in 2010.
The custody battle went on for years because White revealed that he was served custody papers right before he danced in week 2 on Dancing With the Stars.
“I had a process server serve me right before I danced week 2. Right before I danced week 2, we had a whole calamity in my dressing room, and I got lower scores in week 2,” said White.
He also revealed that after his lower scores that week, the press was asking about how he was doing and he said something like “I ain’t worried about the dancing, I got other stuff I’m dealing with. I think I’m gonna be OK, I’ll bounce back,” which the Dancing With the Stars producers were not happy about.
“They’re like ‘stop, cut’ and pull me aside and like, ‘Oh, that’s not what people wanna hear,’ so you know how that goes down, when they start telling you what to say and it turns into The Hunger Games where it’s like if you wanna survive this, we need you to say something closer to this,” White revealed.
But he did say that he has very fond memories of working with partner Johnson, especially when they were able to get out of all the noise and distractions of Los Angeles.
“I always have to give Kym credit, though, once we got out of LA and we came to New York and we rehearsed in New York, something happened between the two of us where we were away from the machine and just two people trying to learn a dance and come back, so week 1 and week 5 of Dancing With the Stars actually do mean a lot to me personally because I was really dancing for my life and people didn’t really know about it,” said White.
“That was a tough time for me, but I always kept my focus on making [Samaya] a better version of me,” said White, adding, “One day, my daughter’s gonna Google me. She’s gonna Google both her parents. And what is she gonna find?”
Dancing With the Stars returns for its 34th season in fall 2025 on ABC and Hulu.
