Honesty time: I don’t watch Dancing with the Stars, but I’m going to suck it up and try to watch for the sake of my…ahem…art. Apparently, this Maksim Chmerkovskiy guy is quite the heartthrob. He doesn’t really rock my boat, but I don’t judge. I know a lot of people don’t understand my attraction to Orlando Bloom. He’s just so pretty!
But back to Maksim. First off, he’s still on the show. His partner is Brandy. He’s not the one who’s been out and about holding hands with Bristol Palin. He was engaged to fellow DwtS dancer Karina Smirnoff for a time and reportedly hooked up with former partner Erin Andrews. I’m not sure about his relationship status now.
Bullying is a hot topic, and Maks he says he was bullied as a kid for being a dancer.
The 30-year-old was born in the USSR but his family immigrated to the US when he was 14, where he had problems making friends due to the language barrier and his love of dance.
“I was always small and skinny. I’d sit at the back of the room in school because I didn’t have many friends, because I had different interests….There was the usual sexuality-related stuff, people calling me gay. When I’d say I danced, people would act like I was diseased. Halloween sucked for me, as my windows would be egged. It hurt and was very upsetting.
I was absolutely picked on. When we moved to the U.S., my second day I was beaten up and had my roller blades stolen. I was 14. But all that was an invaluable lesson to me in determination. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”
[From In Touch Weekly, print edition, November 15, 2010]
Maks credits his family with helping him through the bullying, but also thanks the same kids who bullied him.
“I went out a few months ago and ran into some kids I went to school with who were in cliques I didn’t belong to. The guys came up to me and said, ‘Maks, mad respect! We always knew you’d make it.’ I was like, ‘That’s funny. When you bullied me for my lunch money, it didn’t sound like you were respecting me.’ They apologized. I credit my success to the kids who beat me up!
Bullying is upsetting and shameful, but the shame is on the bully. My advice is to find a place you can go to where you feel you belong…Change your environment if you have to. Start over. Your life has too much of a price to throw it away!”
[From In Touch Weekly, print edition, November 15, 2010]
It seems like Maks is jumping on the “Famous People Who Were Also Bullied” bandwagon, basically telling kids being bullied to suck it up like he did and turn it into a positive experience. If YouTube and Facebook has existed 15 years ago when was being bullied, he may realize that bullying can be more severe when it also ends up online for everyone to see.
On the other hand, he does reinforce the “It Gets Better” message, which can be helpful to teens who think high school is the eternal ninth circle of hell. At least that’s what it was like for me, until I left for college. College didn’t change me from a geek to a swan, but like Maks said, I found other geeks like me to hang around with.
As for Maks, he competes tonight on Dancing with the Stars on ABC, where they will do the “insta-dance.” This means the couples won’t find out which song they’ll be dancing to until they’re on the dance floor.
Photos courtesy of WENN. Note by Kaiser: He has a really tiny head!
Sigh…and so it begins. Not so long ago, Gay was the new black and every third rate celebrity was coming out to US weekly as a bisexual. This season Bullying is the new sexy, and sure enough, third rate celebrities slithering out of the wood work milking this serious issue for all it’s worth. It took Ke$ha two weeks to jump on the Bi bandwagon….it’s only a matter of time before she comes out with the…I was a bullied bisexual boohoo story.
He was always so arrogant when I used to watch the show. Don’t know if he has lost that attitude or not, but it made him very unattractive to me.
He is a classic case of “when hot guy speaks”. He looks great until he opens his mouth. This is the same guy that went off on a tangent about Cheryl Burke and Lacey Schwimmer’s weight gain….
as much as I hated high school, I am glad that social networking sites were not around then. Wow, the things that kids have to put up with nowadays. Not fair to them at all.
Max is a cutey, and very masculine. Dancers are fabulous athletes, not the stereotypical wimps people try to portray them as.
My son was an MVP football player, HATED it for it’s boredom factor (too much waiting around to play). He is currently on a Fine Arts dance scholarship, and worked to DEATH!
My point…his bully was his football coach, who announced to his team that he was missing a football weekend to prance around in a tutu (at an international dance competition). The ones who stuck up for him were his teammates, the coach was the douche in this situation!
We all need to play nice in the sandbox!
Celebitchy. I’m with you on not finding Maksim attractive while EVERYONE around me was drooling over him…THEN…I was waiting for an elevator at The Mohegan Sun in Connecticut after seeing the DWTS show…the door opens…and out walks Maksim…he is incredibly handsome and pretty in one…svelte, masculine, glowing…Karina hobbled out after him (she was on crutches and they were engaged at the time…) she’s a peanut and striking. I say, don’t count him out of your hotties until you see him in person – True…he comes off as arrogant most of the time, but I think part of his commentary gets lost in translation…
I’m so glad my generation was only just discovering the internet when I was in middle school/high school.
Umm, this guy IS a bully. He treats his partners like brainless rag dolls, yelling at them all the time and belittling them. And like someone else said, he AND Louis van Amstel had incredibly rude things to say about Cheryl Burke and Lacy Schwimmer.
Maks is a fantasically talented dancer and has a great business head and a warm heart as well. He is very passionate about what he does and holds himself to a high standard of performance and holds his partners up to that standard as well. I do not agree that he is arrogant. Perhaps those who do should spend a little more time finding out what makes him tick before judging him.
He’s a bully who calls his studio dance students horrid names in foreign languages then acts all nice to them to their faces. He doesn’t look hot. He looks like Hugo Chavez.
I don’t watch this turkey trot on TV, but what he says does make sense, but I like how you broke it down. Maxim’s street cred with me (zero) is holding steady (neutral). LOL
@Pat- Someone who talks about how great he is and how fat others are does not deserve me wasting time looking in to see what makes him tick.
When you have to belittle the women around you in your profession, in order to make yourself feel better that is arrogant, rude and unacceptable.
I watched DWTS tonight, and from what I saw, this Maksim guy is a douche.
Maks is a total douchebag. He talks trash about everyone and tonight on DWTS he jumped all into CarrieAnn’s face and started this tirade about how hard they work and how they never get enough credit. I was thinking, “Dude, you have been on the #1 show for 10 freaking years. Getting paid and famous. Yes, you are a great dancer, it’s very hard, but you chose it, and if not for the show, you’d only be known in the tiny world of ballroom dancing. Get over yourself.”
Maks is gorgeous, albeit he has a huge ego. I’ll take him anyway! Dude is smoking hot and uber-sexy. And he knows it….
I don’t believe that he is making up a story to capitalize on what is “trendy”. I feel like this is a huge issue/problem that is finally getting the attention it needs. So, the more “famous” people who come out and talk about their experiences (and I’m pretty sure ballroom dancing is one of those things that would have made a boy a target in the 80s/90s), the better it is for the millions of people being bullied in their schools. (And I don’t think “millions” is much of an exaggeration). Kids need to hear this type of stuff and bullies need to hear it too.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say Kurt Warner is going home tonight. It should be Bristol, but I think the fan votes will save her.
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