Maddie Ziegler and her mom recently had a healing conversation.
The actress and dancer, 20, revealed during an appearance on the High Low with EmRata podcast that her mom, Melissa Ziegler-Gisoni, apologized to her for her time on Dance Moms.
“Last year, I was having a really bad panic attack and I called my mom and things were coming up from the past, and she apologized to me,” Ziegler told host Emily Ratajkowski in the podcast’s latest episode, which dropped on Tuesday, per Entertainment Tonight.
“She was like, ‘I’m so sorry I put you through that.’ It’s so sad because she would never want to hurt us, but none of us knew how crazy it would get,” Ziegler added.
The West Side Story star went on to recount some of the uncomfortable experiences she had working on the Lifetime reality series as a young child.
“When I was doing the show, in the first season [in 2011] I was 7, and there were male producers saying, ‘This is what you have to say,’ ” she recalled. “My mom wasn’t in the room, so I was like, ‘OK, I just have to do whatever I’m being told.’ They would say, ‘Say you’re the best, say you’re better than everyone else, say blah blah blah.’ ”
Because of that coaching, she said she was “was perceived as a little brat in the first season.”
But while viewers saw her as “the most well-treated dancer” on the show, the reality behind the scenes was far different. “Looking back — and a lot of people have started to say this — it’s like, ‘Wow, she actually had the most pressure on her,’ because she was like, ‘You’re my girl, so you have to lead everyone to victory every time,’ which is just not sustainable,” Ziegler said, seemingly referring to her former dance teacher Abby Lee Miller.
The Ballerina actress was so unhappy that she fought to quit the show with the help of her mom and singer and collaborator, Sia. “[My mom] really did everything to try to break our contract and pull us out, and eventually did with the help of Sia,” she said of her exit in 2016. “It was hard … We would do almost 30 episodes a season, so it consumed our lives.”
Ziegler told Ratajkowski that she remembers very little of the time before she did Dance Moms because she was so young when the show debuted.
“I’ve blocked out so much of my childhood that I actually don’t know what my life was like even just before working,” she said, adding, “It’s weird to find out things that I did when I was younger on TikTok. I’ll see people posting things of me, and I’m like, ‘I don’t even remember doing that.’ ”
The Music star has been very open in the past about what she has described as her “toxic” experiences on Dance Moms.
In Cosmopolitan’s Issue 4: The Fame Issue last year, Ziegler recalled the many challenges associated with her time on the reality series — including working alongside Miller, 57, the infamously tough dance coach — and revealed how she felt after ceasing contact with Miller.
“She was distraught [when I left]. For the longest time, we felt so guilty,” she recalled. “She trained me, she helped me, but also, I knew I would be okay without her and I was sick of being in a toxic environment.”
Ziegler also described the discomfort and embarrassment of having to deal with normal adolescent problems on screen. Her changing body became the subject of unwelcome negative comments from viewers.
“I literally hit puberty in front of everyone on TV, and that’s a super-weird thing,” she said. “I started developing boobs and I got my period and my body started changing, and people were like, ‘Oh, she’s gaining weight. She’s getting fat.’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa! I’m literally becoming more of a woman!’ ”
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