Even during Dancing With the Stars' Halloween-themed Villains Night, the celebrity contestants are finding a way to bring us to tears!
On Monday night, Johnny Weir and his pro partner, Britt Stewart, performed a beautiful Viennese Waltz to a cover of Radiohead's "Creep." The song holds a very special meaning to Johnny, for a number of reasons.
"Growing up in figure skating, I never felt accepted into the community I was trying to be in," Johnny said in the video package that aired before he danced. "I had just turned 16, and I was competing internationally at the Olympic level. An agent said, 'We're the agency that can take you where you want to be.' But then he said, 'If you work with us, and we create this future for you, you can't be gay.'"
"At 16, standing with your mother, that isn't necessarily a topic that you want to address. My sexuality is not something that I had really voiced," he continued. "And you can't fix that, you can't change that. I was mortified, I remember going up to my room, and my mom said, 'You don't need them. You'll just skate really well, you'll book the jobs yourself.'"
At the end of the video package, Johnny said that he "used all that negativity" to his advantage, and still does to this day.
"You learn to listen to no one but your heart," he explained. "Being unique has given me the life that I have. The song 'Creep' empowers me, and the best performances I ever gave on the ice were when I had the most to prove."
Judge Bruno Tonioli called the routine "very, very good," while Carrie Ann Inaba praised, "You floated through that like a dream. It was really beautiful, well done."
"The costume, the theme, the way you played that character, the dancing ... it was a perfect formula," Derek Hough added. "Fantastic!"
Johnny and Britt received a total score of 27/30 for the routine.
Prior to his performance on Monday night, Johnny teased via Twitter that the dance was going to be "emotional."
"Get your @Kleenex ready," he wrote. "Me and @BrittBStewart are going to have the most emotional dance Monday. 'Creep' is my heart song and I'm so proud to bring it to the stage."
Fans of Johnny's may know that this isn't the first time the Olympic figure skater has performed to this song. In 2015, dressed in black from head to toe, he skated to it during An Evening With Champions.
He performed to it again in 2017 when he was the special guest star at the University of Delaware's US National Figure Skating Send-Off Exhibition.
Last week, Johnny and Britt surprisingly placed in the bottom two for the first time, but were saved by Derek and Bruno, who chose to send Vernon Davis and Peta Murgatroyd home packing.
"I'm so honored that we get to continue in this competition because our dance next week is to one of my favorite songs," Johnny told ET in his post-show Zoom interview. "It means so much to me, and this whole competition I've been building, because I wanted to dance to 'Creep' on Dancing With the Stars, but it hasn't fit in the schedule yet. It's finally happening! So I'm very excited and very honored and proud and thankful to all the votes that we got."
"It's reality television so anything can happen. My critiques were not glowing, and I have a much smaller, yet fiercer fan base than some of the other competitors," he continued. "It wasn't nice being in the bottom two, but I've already taken that out of my brain, thrown it away, and am moving on."
Hear more in the video below.
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