Tom Bergeron is returning to “Dancing With The Stars” five years after being fired, but he said he has no regrets about what he did to lose the job in the first place.
The long-running dance competition celebrates its 20th anniversary Tuesday night, and Bergeron will be back as a guest judge, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Bergeron hosted the show from 2005 to 2019 before being canned in 2020 after he publicly objected to former White House press secretary Sean Spicer being cast on the show.
It wasn’t Spicer in particular that bothered Bergeron, just his belief that the show should avoid politics entirely.
“What I get a kick out of is when every so often on social media, I’ll see somebody, like, ‘Well, if Tom hadn’t brought politics into the show, he wouldn’t have got fired,’” he told THR.
“It’s like: Guys, I was the one who was trying not to bring politics into the show. Even when I released my statement, I was very careful not to mention a political party or Sean [Spicer], because that wasn’t the issue.
“I even said to Sean, ‘If they had cast Hillary Clinton — I voted for her, I don’t want her on the show. We’re on the cusp of an election year, in 2019,’” Bergeron explained. “It was the wrong move, and after having been assured they wouldn’t do something like that, for them to turn around and do it, that was just the last straw.”
Political tensions have only gotten more intense since Bergeron left “DWTS,” and that makes him even more insistent about not casting politicians on the show.
“Look at where we are now — the government is shut down. These people can’t even communicate with each other,” he said. “I’ve always felt ’Dancing With the Stars’ should be the two hours where you can just get away from all the bullshit and enjoy yourself, and have fun and look at the camaraderie of the cast.”
Bergeron said he understands the belief some people have that doing the series shows that political figures are “real people too,” but he doesn’t agree with it one bit, saying it “just heightens the tensions.”