Whitney Leavitt may be down, but she’s not out.
A little more than a week after her controversial elimination from “Dancing With the Stars,” Leavitt announced during a tell-all interview on the podcast “Call Her Daddy” that she recently booked her first movie, details forthcoming.
But that’s not all.
Sitting under bright lights beside her dance partner, Mark Ballas, the “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” cast member said she was working on bringing one of the duo’s performances from the dance competition show to Broadway.
Not bad for a 32-year-old mom of three whose unapologetic ambition and love of the spotlight has divided America.
(Disney | Eric McCandless) Leavitt and Ballas perform on "Dancing With the Stars."
Her upcoming projects weren’t the only reveals from the episode that had amassed nearly 2 million views within 48 hours of appearing on YouTube.
Leavitt’s Nov. 18 elimination — which followed an online campaign to divert votes away from her — meant she and Ballas never had a chance to perform their “freestyle” dance, reserved for the finale.
“Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper saw an opening. Partnering with ABC, Cooper gave the duo a chance to unveil the haunting performance.
Set to a remix of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and the “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” theme song, the dance is a visual indictment of the online hate slung at Leavitt and Ballas during their time together on the just-ended dance show. There are mirrors, smeared lipstick and phone-wielding backup dancers — and the words, flashed on the screen at the very end, “Social media is bad for your mental health.”
This was the focus, too, of the interview, during which Ballas, a “Dancing With the Stars” veteran, expressed that he had never been the focus of such negative, personal attacks until this past season.
Leavitt said she had become used to the critics, but that she felt guilty for being, as she saw it, the reason her dance partner was now experiencing what had become just part of life in the spotlight for her.
“I felt,” she said, “like it was my fault.”
At one point, Ballas reads an expletive-laden example, a post he said he encountered one night just after tucking his son to bed.
Cooper recoils, but isn’t totally shocked, either.
“I have sat with people after [being] on reality television and they look me in the eyes and are depleted, are exhausted,” she said. “...We are creating this thing online that it’s like, it’s not fun anymore.”