‘DWTS’ judge Ann Inaba defends Julia Stiles, Jenna Dewan casting

Carrie Ann Inaba is weighing in on the age-old debate over whether contestants with dance experience have an unfair advantage on Dancing With the Stars.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly after the season 35 cast announcement last week, the longtime judge explained why contestants like Julia Stiles and Jenna Dewan still have plenty to learn, despite their dancing backgrounds on Save the Last Dance and Step Up, respectively.

“What’s difficult — and I don’t think people realize this — is when you go from being a jazz dancer or a hip-hop dancer or all the other forms of dancing [to ballroom], the weight placement is so different,” she explained.

“It’s weird because your body has memory, so it remembers how to dance, and it thinks it already knows how to do these moves, but it doesn’t. It takes a lot of time to un-train the body to put your weight on the front more over your toes instead of back and down and grounded,” she said, noting that it’s “not as easy as people think.”

Inaba acknowledged that Stiles and Dewan “have an advantage in some ways because they’ve got the rhythm and they’ve got the musicality and they know how to dance.”

Still, she pointed out that “it’s been a few years since they’ve all danced, right?”