Julia Stiles clapped back at her “Dancing With the Stars” partner Ezra Sosa with a blunt nickname after he apologized for riding her hard in rehearsal.
The “10 Things I Hate About You” actress, 45, and Sosa, 25, were gearing up for Tuesday’s “Horror Movie Night” episode when their practice sessions for an Argentine tango turned tense. The pair were set to perform to “The Dogs Attack” from the 1976 horror film “The Omen,” and Sosa had admitted he was pushing Stiles extra hard because fellow competitors Jenna Dewan and Amber Glenn were also tackling the same dance style.
Sosa came into the rehearsal room with a warning. “Be prepared,” he told Stiles. Once they started running the routine, he peppered her with critiques about technique, including demands for “no heel leads.” Stiles grew visibly overwhelmed by the barrage of corrections and frustration.
“I just don’t respond well to frustration,” she told Sosa during the session. “What gets the best work out of me is to not be like, ‘You’re doing it wrong! You’re just doing this, and you’re just doing that!'”
In a confessional interview, Sosa owned up to his approach. “I was being too hard” on Stiles, he acknowledged. He defended his intensity, though, explaining his motives ran deeper than simple drill-sergeant tactics.
“I want to push her because I know her excellence,” Sosa shared. “I know what she can bring to the table. And I just don’t want her to be disappointed when we perform this routine.”
The choreographer eventually pulled Stiles aside in the rehearsal space to apologize, confessing he had been “pushing too far.” Stiles waved off the mea culpa entirely and turned the moment into a chance to tease her partner.
“It’s not your job to protect my ego or babysit me. I can handle it,” she told him. “I love you. You don’t have to apologize. I think you need to get more sleep, because you’re a cranky bitch when you’re tired.”
Deciding she needed “to be a big girl and do what coach tells me,” Stiles committed to powering through the remaining preparation. The exchange marked a reset for the partnership after a rocky build to performance night.
When they finally took the floor before the judges, the duo’s Argentine tango landed a 26 out of 40. Judge Derek Hough flagged the score as a “low” point in Stiles’ run on Season 35 of the ABC competition series.
The middling marks came during a brutal week for the cast. The “Horror Movie Night” installment featured wildly polarized scoring across the board and ended with a savage double elimination that sent two couples packing. Tyler Cameron and Jackson Olson were both sent home, with pros Sharna Burgess and Emma Slater exiting alongside their celebrity partners.
Stiles and Sosa narrowly escaped the cut, surviving to dance another week despite their rehearsal friction and disappointing numbers.
The tension between Stiles and Sosa had roots in Sosa’s competitive anxiety about the stacked “Horror Movie Night” field. With Dewan and Glenn both performing Argentine tangos of their own, Sosa felt pressure to distinguish their routine through technical precision. His drilling on details like heel leads — a fundamental element of the dance where the heel strikes the floor before the toe — backfired when Stiles shut down under the critical tone rather than the content of the notes.
The clash offered a raw window into how celebrity-pro partnerships strain under the show’s compressed rehearsal schedule and live-performance stakes. Stiles’ pushback against Sosa’s methods, and her quick pivot to humor once he softened, showed the pair navigating a reset in real time.
New episodes of “Dancing With the Stars” air Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern on ABC and Disney+, and stream on Hulu the following day.