Julia Stiles enters the DWTS premiere with a public correction already attached to her name: The Juilliard School said on Sept. 3 that she did not attend. The post landed just before Dancing With the Stars season 35, and it pushed a long-running screen-life mix-up back into the open.
On Sept. 6, Stiles and Ezra Sosa addressed the post at the 2026 Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Stiles said she heard about it because Juilliard posted, "For the record, she did not go to our school," and Sosa called it "kind of shady, but honestly, really funny."
The Sept. 3 Juilliard post
"*Checks registrar* No, Julia Stiles did not, in fact, attend Juilliard. But we love her anyway," the school wrote on Instagram on Sept. 3. It added, "P.S. Good luck on DWTS, Julia… we’re cheering you on." That put the school directly into the pre-premiere conversation instead of leaving the old assumption to keep circulating on its own.
Stiles said, "That was a pretend character I played in a movie." She also said, "Not only did I not go to Juilliard, I didn't even audition for Juilliard, and I couldn't even, as an actress, get a dancer." The distinction matters because the public image came from her role as Sara Johnson in Save the Last Dance, not from her real academic path.
Stiles and Ezra Sosa react
Stiles said she graduated from Columbia University, and she added a detail that strips away any dance myth around her casting: "I stopped taking dance classes after that movie." She also said, "I wasn't even that good of a dancer to start with." For DWTS, that means the season is not riding on a hidden conservatory background; it is built on training visible on camera.
Sosa said rehearsals have been moving fast, saying, "She's doing absolutely incredible." He added, "I will confidently say I've never worked with someone who's working so hard and who's so passionate about doing this, and it just makes me so excited to see their journey on the show." That is the useful read on this pairing: the performance story is the work rate, not the movie role.
So Stilez before Sept. 14
Stiles and Sosa chose the team name So Stilez before the Sept. 14 premiere, and Sosa said it was a play on their two last names. He also said they were planning to get tattoos together to commemorate the season, then added, "Literally, it was probably one of our first discussions."
Sosa said, "We're like, 'So the tattoos.'" He added, "We don't know what we're gonna get yet," and, "We're just gonna let the season unfold, and then we'll see what the tattoo is." The immediate question now is how much of the season will be defined by the dance itself rather than the old Juilliard connection, because the school has already taken that myth off the table.
Stiles did not attend Juilliard, and the public correction gives DWTS season 35 a cleaner frame heading into Sept. 14: a contestant with a movie-born dance image, a pro partner talking up the rehearsal grind, and a school that chose to step into the story before the premiere.
