There is something almost mischievous about putting Julia Stiles and a Savannah Bananas player in the same room and calling them both stars. Yet when Dancing with the Stars unveiled its Season 35 cast, there they were: Stiles, the actor perennially associated with Save the Last Dance; baseball player Jackson Olson; The Rookie actor Jenna Dewan; chef Giada De Laurentiis; Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor Tatyana Ali; singer and ‘90s heartthrob Taylor Hanson; Olympic figure skater Amber Glenn; reality TV personalities Maura Higgins and Ciara Miller; Paralympian Ezra Frech; The Bachelorette star Tyler Cameron; Glee and Grey's Anatomy star Harry Shum Jr.; Jimmy Kimmel sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez; and TikTok-era comedians and creators. It is an extremely 2026 collection of famous people, meaning almost nobody will recognize all of them.
On Tuesday, they will start dancing when Season 35 premieres on September 15 and continues September 16, live on ABC and Disney+, before settling into its regular Tuesday schedule. The cast list offers a small lesson in what has happened to American culture. There was once a reasonably coherent national answer to the question: who is a celebrity?
Dancing with the Stars, which premiered in 2005, has survived long enough to watch that consensus disappear. Producers realized that the show no longer needs everybody to know its stars. It needs everybody to know somebody.
Casting director Deena Katz and executive producer Conrad Green have been assembling versions of this peculiar dinner party for years. The objective is a room filled with folks living different kinds of fame. Green described the formula after last season: Katz, he said, builds casts that can appeal to the show’s older viewers and its newer Gen Z audience at the same time.
Season 35 makes the strategy very visible. Someone who watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as it aired can show up for Ali. Someone whose teenage years contained “MMMBop” and whose nostalgic flair defines TV viewing habits gets Hanson.
Bachelor Nation, always a staple on every season, gets Cameron. Foodies get De Laurentiis. TikTok obsessives get Connor Wood, while sports fans get Glenn and Frech.
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