Bethany Antonia's Nancy Strictly moment arrived with a same-sex pairing on Strictly Come Dancing. She was partnered with Nancy Xu after asking to dance with another woman, making the pairing the show's third all-female same-sex partnership.
The 28-year-old opened her first week with a Quickstep to Stop This Flame by Celeste and finished on 26 points. Craig Revel Horwood said, "That’s the first bit of good dancing we’ve seen all night!"
2020 and 2022 pairings
Nicola Adams and Katya Jones set the template in 2020, and Jayde Adams and Karen Hauer followed in 2022. Bethany Antonia and Nancy Xu now extend that pattern inside a format that has only occasionally used same-sex partnerships, giving the show another visible all-female pairing rather than a one-off experiment.
Antonia has said the choice mattered to her family. "It was a huge part of watching people in my family accept this beautiful show that we’d watched for years and years and years, and see this new way of the girls doing it together, and then being so accepting and exciting about it made me feel proud," she said.
From House of the Dragon
Antonia is best known for playing Lady Baela Targaryen in House of the Dragon, and she has also appeared in Doctors, Get Even and Doctor Who. Earlier this year she was cast as Eurydice in the West End production of Hadestown, which puts her on a busy run across television, stage and Saturday-night television.
The pairing also lands after Antonia publicly shared that she was a lesbian in 2024, and after her first public statement on her sexuality came in response to a racist DM. She called the pairing "a real privilege," saying, "It was a thing that I talked into existence, so it feels like a real privilege."
Week one pressure
26 points is a solid start, but the practical test is whether Antonia and Xu can keep enough support to survive the early rounds and stay together through the competition. For viewers, the immediate watch item is simple: the pairing has moved from request to debut, and now the scoreboard will decide how long it lasts.
