Sarah Jane Nader and Hailey Bills pushed their Dancing With the Stars run into view with multiple rehearsal clips before their September 16 debut. The pair’s pre-show rollout is notable because they are only the third same-sex couple in the show’s 35-season run and the second all-female pairing.
Sarah Jane Nader and Hailey Bills
On Thursday, September 10, Bills posted a rehearsal-space video on Instagram of the two on the floor, wearing sweats and sneakers with their legs wrapped around each other. In the clip, they mouthed the words to an audio about oversharing, while Bills wrote, “When you officially met 2 weeks ago and know everything ab[out] each other.”
The duo kept building that image. They later posted a video of themselves holding hands and strutting in sync to Waka Flocka Flame’s “No Hands,” using the team name “Estrogenz.”
Season 35 history
The history marker here is simple and unusual: Nader and Bills are the third same-sex couple to appear on Dancing With the Stars, following Jojo Siwa and Jenna Johnson in 2021 and Shangela and Gleb Savchenko in 2022. They are also the second all-female pairing, which puts their debut in a narrow lane inside a 35-season franchise that has only opened that door a few times.
Sarah Jane Nader is a bisexual reality star and model, and Bills is her first-time pro partner. That pairing gives the show another queer-facing matchup on a season built around 16 celebrities, and it adds another data point to the franchise’s gradual expansion of who gets paired with whom.
The Cup Song preview
On September 13, Nader posted a TikTok video with Bills and Amber Glenn on the Dancing With the Stars stage, where the three danced and lip synced to “The Room Where It Happens” from Hamilton in purple lights. Two days later, Nader posted a video of herself and Bills attempting “The Cup Song,” wearing matching black workout tanks.
Her Instagram carousel from that period also included two photos of Bills wrapping her hand around Nader’s waist and hips. The chemistry has been visible before the live debut, but the pair have not yet officially debuted on Dancing With the Stars, which is why the rehearsal footage is doing so much of the work for them right now.
September 16 debut
The immediate next step is the live performance scheduled for September 16, when the female contestants on season 35 were set to dance. That is the first chance to see whether the offstage footage translates into a live routine, and the show’s rare same-sex casting makes the debut one of the season’s most watched entries before a single score is posted.
