Slammin' Secrets About Save the Last Dance

1. Save the Last Dance wasn't Julia Stiles' first time showing off her skills onscreen. True teen flick connoisseurs recall the 40-second scene in 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You that saw a 17-year-old Stiles climb atop a table at Bogey Lowenstein's bash and truly hypnotize her fellow partygoers as Biggie Smalls' hit played. It captivated film execs as well.

"[Director] Thomas Carter told me that he suggested I screen-test for the movie because he had seen a scene in 10 Things I Hate About You where I'm dancing on the table," Stiles told E! News in 2021, "and he's like, 'Oh, she has rhythm.'"

2. Of course that wasn't the only experience she brought to the gig. "I've been dancing since I was little," she shared on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn while promoting the movie in 2001. Still, to play a teenage ballerina with a realistic shot at attending Juilliard, her years of modern dance experience weren't going to cut it.

"I had to do, like, a month and a half of four hours a day dancing my tush off," she said. While that left the 19-year-old in what she called "the best shape of my life," her feet were destroyed: "Oh my god, I had the nastiest feet….They'd bleed, they'd get calluses, blisters, bunions, all that stuff." 

3. But it was all worth it as she reallllllly didn't want a body double. "The dilemma for me was I had to constantly prove myself as a dancer, because I didn't want them to double me," she explained to Hollywood.com months after the movie's release. "So I was like, I understand you're gonna have to double en pointe cause I can't do pointe, but everything else has to be me. And I told them I didn't want them to bring a hip-hop double in." 

Thus, much of her training focused on those routines "and I was more comfortable with it," she said. As for the ballet, let's just say it required a jeté of faith. "Everyone's expecting that you're not gonna be able to dance well because you're the actress," she continued. "The first time we shot one of the ballet things I was shaking. And when we'd done a couple of takes I was able to relax."

4. Her counterpart had to put in work as well. At the time, Sean Patrick Thomas was a 31-year-old actor with a handful of film credits who had barely seen the inside of a studio. "I didn't have dance experience, except for some aerobics dance classes, and I had to dance at the final audition," he recalled in an interview with Nitrate Online. "Usually, with any type of choreography, you have to learn it and practice it. I didn't have that chance—they taught it to me that morning. I did the best I could."

He continued putting in the work after he was cast. "I'm not a dancer at all, I'm just a regular person," he explained to E! News in 2021. "And so I was anxious for the opportunity to not screw it up when it came to filming. So if they were going to come and teach me stuff, I was very eager for it because I was so afraid of looking like a complete dork. So I didn't feel like it was extra work in the sense of, like, 'Oh god, I gotta do this again.' I was more like, 'Give me more, give me more, give me more, because I can't screw this up.'" 

6. Her years at the barre wasn't the only experience Stiles drew on during the Chicago shoot. Growing up in New York City's Soho, the eldest of Judith and John Stiles' three kids, her urban middle school was "a lot like [the film] where I was the only white girl," she told Hollywood.com. "And I wanted to be a homegirl so badly, so I hung out with the tough homegirls and pretended to be like that."

She told Rolling Stone that her daily uniform included door-knocker earrings not unlike those she wore in the film, a Raiders hat and a healthy application of lip liner. "Everyone wanted to be a homeboy or homegirl," she explained, "and I tried to imitate that." 

15. Safe to say Stiles' fame-making film isn't on her regular viewing list. "Save the Last Dance came on TV the other night ... and there was a part of me that was curious about the memories of making that movie," she shared during a 2019 appearance on Good Morning America. "And then I immediately turned it off because it was cringeworthy to me. When you see pictures of yourself as a teenager, part of you goes like, 'Oh yeah.' And then part of you is like, 'Oh my God.'"

Though, sign us up for the sorta kinda reboot Washington first floated in Stiles' 2001 Rolling Stone profile. Gushing about her costar's "intelligence and commitment and pure talent," Washington said, "I look forward to working with her when we're both in our sixties."