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Former Dancing with the Stars host Samantha Harris revealed she was once given notes on her appearance while hosting the hit dance competition from 2006 to 2009.
In conversation with former pro dancer Cheryl Burke on her DWTS podcast Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans, Harris claimed that she was told to look more “pasty and pudgy” on camera.
She recalled, “I got actually called into a meeting and they said, ‘So, Samantha, going to the next season…’ My interpretation was they said to me, ‘You need to be pasty and pudgy.’ But really what they said to me was, ‘You’re getting too tan and too toned that the viewers’ — and I’d like to give all of you listening as viewers a lot more credit then what they said — but the viewers ‘are confusing you with the dancers because you’re too tanned and too toned.'”
Harris said they instructed her to “stop doing any self-tanning — which I’ll be honest, I tanned as much as you guys did — and to gain weight.”
The former host said DWTS bosses told her viewers needed to “relate to you as the host being basically a complete dichotomy next to the dancers.”
Though she was shocked at the time, Harris was actually planning to stop tanning because she had recently learned that she was pregnant.
“Usually you’re told to lose weight,” she told Burke. “I was actually told to gain weight. So of course I said, ‘Okay, of course, no problem. I got that covered,’ because little did they know — it was too early for me to share yet — I was pregnant, so I wasn’t going to be tanning because I didn’t know what the chemicals were that would be seeping into my body and I was going to be gaining weight.”
She stepped away from the show in 2009 after Season 9. At the time, she said in a public statement that she was leaving so she could focus on her other television hosting duties. But she revealed on the podcast that she was forced to leave when DWTS chose not to renew her contract.
After her exit, former contestant Brooke Burke took over to co-host alongside Tom Bergeron.
