There’s no doubt that Abby Lee Miller was the on-screen villain of Dance Moms, but what didn’t know is just how much the producers were putting her through it behind the scenes. They pushed her limits so much that she almost quit the show on numerous occasions, but in one specific instance, she had to put her foot down to stand up for Maddie Ziegler.
The power struggle at ALDC
The choreographer and pop culture icon recently spoke to E! News about the ups and downs of her run on Dance Moms. At one point, she claimed that the Dance Moms producers tried to block Maddie from her career-defining appearance in Sia’s Chandelier music video.
“I quit my job many times,” Abby confessed. “The first time I quit and said, ‘Get your stuff, get out of my building,’ was when they didn’t want Maddie to go do the Sia video.”
At the time, Maddie was 11 years old, and that music video appearance kicked off a longtime relationship with her and Sia. However, it sounds like the Dance Mom team thought their show was more important.
“They weren’t allowing that,” Abby continued. “And I was like, ‘She’s going, that’s it.'”
Abby won that round, but she said the producers still tried to pull a fast one on Maddie when she got back from shooting the video. It goes to show that Abby wasn’t the only one terrorizing these tweens. There were plenty of people doing it behind the camera, too.
“They gave her a solo that day to put her on the spot, to make her fail,” Abby recalled.
However, Abby was still one step ahead of the producers. She said they wound up just reusing an old routine. The Dance Moms producers were probably too busy feeling salty to notice.
“We just used an old solo and put different music to it,” Abby continued. “They didn’t even know.”
Dance Moms is streaming via Lifetime.
TELL US – ARE YOU SURPRISED TO HEAR ABOUT THIS SIDE OF ABBY? DO YOU THINK THE PRODUCERS WERE WRONG FOR TRYING TO PREVENT MADDIE FROM BEING IN THE SIA VIDEO?
