Brooke Burke is opening up about how her victorious 2008 Dancing with the Stars partnership with Derek Hough went from strained to “magical.”
Burke, 52, discussed her experience with Hough, 38, on the latest episode of fellow DWTS alum Cheryl Burke’s podcast Sex, Lies and Spray Tans.
When the pair first met, Brooke told Cheryl, 39, that “I just thought [Derek] was so young and green and safe. I had no idea he would be such a powerful, badass choreographer.”
Over the course of the season, in large part due to a round of “valuable” couples therapy arranged by producers when the partners weren’t “gelling,” Brooke admits she ended up “crushing on Derek.”
At the time, the presenter was married to actor David Charvet (from whom she eventually split in 2018), but she told Cheryl, “had I not been married… I would have actually hoped we would have had a love affair.”
As Brooke admitted, “I don’t think I’ve ever said that,” Cheryl revealed that, at the time, Hough was also gushing behind the scenes about “how hot” his partner was.
“I would have had an affair with him,” Brooke reiterated, adding, “But listen, let me tell you why: You are intertwined with someone’s body when you’re not a dancer. There is no way that I have ever been so connected — besides with a lover or a husband — than I was with Derek. And it’s every single day. So for three months, you are in someone’s arms. Why do you think people fall in love? You smell them, you feel them, you’re breathing with them. It can be more intimate than making love in a bedroom — you’re making love on a dance floor, you feel more connected. If you have energy, you’re doing this dance and you’re in the rhythm, and then there’s trust, then you’re sharing fear, you’re doing something you’ve never done. How many times do you go through an experience with someone where they’re all you’ve got?”
She summed up that she’d only ever “had one experience with one person like that [outside the ballroom]. Life-changing.”
Before Hough — who is now newly married to fellow former DWTS pro Hayley Erbert — solidified his sizzling on-screen connection with Brooke, though, the duo were struggling mightily to find their rhythm as partners. (“”He was really tough, he was really hard on me. I’m OK with tough love. He did not love me through routines and support me and tell me that it was amazing. He was brutally honest,” she said, acknowledging that eventually that tack made her “better.”)
Seeing the discord, even her then-husband encouraged her to get closer: “David was like, ‘You need to go and talk to Derek, you need to get out of your funk, you need to go connect before a performance.’ Because we were completely disconnected. We were in our own world, and yet we were a partnership, we were a team … [but] we weren’t behaving like teammates.”
Among the “issues off camera and in rehearsals,” she explained that Hough, then just 23, “was exhausted, he was recording an album at night. I had a 3-month-old baby. I was fried — up all night, training all day … so my body was, like, depleted. I was also hormonal.”
She explained, “I was a woman and a mother. I felt like he was a young man. We just, we weren’t meeting each other in a place that was serving us. So we went to this life coach therapy session. And I was surprised that it never aired because I thought it was super real and super valuable.”
According to Brooke, the advice she and her partner were given was: “You have to meet each other with honesty.”
For Brooke, that meant, “She wanted me to be able to say, ‘I’m exhausted, I don’t have the energy to be here, my baby was crying all night, my family misses me, I’m f — -ing scared, I don’t know this routine, you’re being mean, I’m not OK!’ Because when you’re honest with someone … there’s something amazing that happens when you meet someone with truth and honesty.”
Brooke continued, “The other thing she said that was really valuable was, ‘You guys are not in this to win it.’ And we weren’t, Cheryl. He was really scared and insecure. He just thought, ‘Let’s stick around for as long as we can. We’re not gonna win the Mirrorball Trophy.’”
Cheryl asked if the pair ever had that conversation out loud, and Brooke said they had not — but affirmed, “I knew his young mind. I knew he wasn’t competing to win. I knew it was an opportunity for both of us — I was there to get to know America in a different way. I think he was there because it was a great gig as a dancer, it was big for him. I don’t think people sign up for Dancing with the Stars to win the Mirrorball Trophy — it’s not even attainable, you don’t think it’s possible. So she said to us, ‘You’re both here, and you’re committed to being here, you might as well frickin’ get in it to win it.’ And we were like, ‘ Oh.’”
Around the same time, she was injured, suffering a disrupted tendon and a pulled hamstring. “I kind of could have tapped out because I had an injury,” she recalled. “I was done. I just wanted to go back to what was easy. I was literally taking Epsom salt baths in the morning getting ready to go to rehearsal. I was coming home at night, like, crying in the shower because I was in pain. I was hurting, and I didn’t have faith in my body.”
But her husband stepped in again: “David said to me — he was amazing and I’ll never forget it — he said, ‘You gotta pull it together. What kind of message would that send to the kids? You’re not gonna quit. Are you a quitter?’”
With those words of advice in mind, Brooke recalled “a meeting of the minds” where she and her partner “made a commitment and promise to meet each other with honesty and compassion. … As soon as we changed our mindset and as soon as we got in it to win it and as soon as we met each other with honesty, something magical happened and we found faith in each other — at least I did — and we just decided to win.”
Not only did Brooke and Hough — who has now taken a seat the judges’ table — go on to win season 7 of the ABC dance competition, she also landed a gig co-hosting the program alongside Tom Bergeron from 2010 to 2013.
Burke told Good Morning America in 2019 that winning the Mirrorball Trophy was “one of the most amazing moments of my life.”
But before the glamour and off-the-cuff quips, she’d had to earn her stripes backstage. “People don’t realize behind the scenes, there’s a whole series of events that happen on Dancing with the Stars that will break you down, and they will f — — with your mind, they will tap into your insecurities, they will shake you,” Brooke candidly told Cheryl. “And if you’re lucky, you push through the other side of those moments.”
Looking back on the breakthrough she had with Hough, Brooke recognizes she “learned how to face my fears and I learned how to win.”
She noted, “One of the greatest feelings was winning — but it was also completing an experience and giving it my all, everything that I had. And that I was really proud of. Even if I didn’t win, I was really proud of … devoting three months, seven days a week. So I left [that competition] going, ‘I can do anything!’”
She affirmed, “I’m so lucky that I was able to go the distance, and it wasn’t about the winning. I’m lucky that I was able to face challenges and show up on the other side of them and learn, learn how to communicate, learn how to show up for a partner, learn how to show up for myself, learn how to have faith in my own body and movement, learn how to quiet down the noise around me and be in a moment that scared the s — — out of me.”
Hough ultimately won the competition six times before becoming a judge in 2020 alongside Bruno Tonioli, Carrie Ann Inaba and the late Head Judge Len Goodman, who died in April.
Derek’s sister Julianne is currently co-hosting season 32 with Alfonso Ribeiro when Dancing with the Stars airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and Disney+.
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