Each season, “Most Memorable Year” night is the most emotional episode of “Dancing With the Stars.” Monday night’s episode was no different when the evening came to an end with Selma Blair and Sasha Farber saying goodbye to the competition.
In a pre-recorded packaged, Blair told her partner that she couldn’t continue due to health concerns connected to her multiple sclerosis. The duo hugged close while watching the package from inside the ballroom.
“I had these MRIs and the results came back and it just all adds up to… I can’t go on with the competition,” she said. “With a chronic illness, you do have special considerations, and my body is definitely taking a hit. It’s way too much for the safety of my bones. There’s just intensive bone trauma and inflammation … I could do extensive damage that, of course, I do not want.”
The pair performed one last “gentle” dance, a waltz set to “What the World Needs Now.” Beofre getting her score — a perfect 40 — she shared that prior to the show, she had basically been on bed rest for the last ten years.
The entire ballroom was emotional following the shocking exit, with each pro, celebrity and judge lining up to hug to Blair before she exited.
“From day one of joining this show and knowing Sasha before that some, this has been such an awakening in ways that I didn’t think would happen in my lifetime,” she told PvNew in the ballroom, as she beginning to cry. “I didn’t think I’d even have this earnestness in my lifetime to genuinely want to do this and for risk of embarrassment. Forgetting my disabilities or my chronic illness, I wasn’t an accomplished dancer at all. So it’s always scary to put it out there. Seeing how every dancer that has come on this show this season has been truly a top-notch star, that makes me realize something really big about our perceptions of people or certain shows or what we think. This is gold here. What these celebrities and pros put together is real passion of some kind of self-love, acceptance and performance. It’s a really wonderful reminder and to be embraced by these people, my heart is broken in the best way.”
When asked whether she’d return for the finale, she said she had “high hopes,” but that Farber wasn’t so sure.
“We gotta look after her health and her body, that’s priority number one and I think the hard thing is with these injuries, she doesn’t feel her left side,” he said, noting that sometimes she feels good but is actually injuring herself. “When I would be like, ‘Are you OK? How are you feeling? Does this hurt?’ She would be like, ‘No, I’m great, I’m great!’ But little did we know… sometimes the connection would come back to her body and she would have proper feel of the left leg and the side.”
Farber added that Blair had really helped him as well, as he had been going through loss in his personal life.
“It’s been a shit-show of a year to put it lightly,” he said. “But there isn’t enough words to tell to say how proud I am. She is a true inspiration. She has not only inspired myself, but so many people around the world. And I’m saying world not just America, because we’ve been getting so much support from overseas. There’s nothing that this lady can’t do. This lady right here is an incredible mother, an amazing, iconic actress and a phenomenal dancer. And I couldn’t be more proud.”
