Academy Award nominee Ariana DeBose discussed her “first big brush with rejection” and how she “felt so checked” by The Devil Wears Prada in a new interview.
Appearing on Thursday’s (17 March) episode of Marc Maron’s podcast WTF with Marc Maron, the West Side Story actor talked about being eliminated from season six of So You Think You Can Dance in the first week of public voting.
“My god, what a bruise to the baby, baby ego,” DeBose, who was 18 at the time, told Maron.
“I was voted off in front of six million people, but mind you the ratings on ABC’s Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin were higher than that particular night’s viewership,” she added.
Explaining the significance of her short-lived stint on Fox’s dancing reality television show, DeBose told Maron that, while it wasn’t her big break, it “redirected me to New York” after spending a month in college in North Carolina, and deciding it wasn’t for her.
At this time, she told Maron she was focussed on her professional career and didn’t have much of a personal life, before catching his use of the word “ambition”.
“It’s funny you bring up that little word ‘ambition’, she said, before telling Maron about how she left the cinema “crying” after watching The Devil Wears Prada because she wondered whether she was “too ambitious”.
“I felt so checked by that film. You’re watching Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), you’re watching Andy Saks (Anne Hathaway). Two women in different positions in an industry and they both have ambition,” she explained, adding, “It wasn’t a movie about the perils of ambition but it was just like: what are you going to stand for?”
DeBose, who has been a professional dancer all her life, has been nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 reimagining of West Side Story.
In the run-up to the Academy Awards, on 27 March, the 31-year-old took home both the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Bafta awards for the role.
