Brian Kennedy wowed the judges with his emotional dance on the first night of Dancing with the Stars.
“There’s something about you when I watch you that gives me chills,” Karen told him, before the pair received a total of 23.
Brian has had a tough journey with his health over the last decade. He was diagnosed with cancer, underwent chemotherapy, had a quadruple heart bypass, and then caught COVID-19.
“I thought about it long and hard,” he tells VIP Magazine about his decision to join the latest season of the dancing show.
“I went to my cardiologist and I got a stress test. I passed it with flying colours.”
He was visibly emotional after his first dance on Sunday with his partner, James Cutler, and Brian confesses: “What started to happen in rehearsals is that I would look at James, a 36-year-old, handsome, slim, young man from Birmingham, and he started to represent my past self. I’m heavier than I’ve ever been, I’m almost 60, my body is like Frankenstein’s Monster.
“I’ve got all these scars, in fact, I started calling it Dancing with the Scars for a while. What became apparent to us is that he embodied my pre-cancer self, my pre-heart attack self, when I could pick any type of trousers or jacket off the shelf and put them on. All those things have changed, but here I am dancing on the biggest programme on TV. It’s about physical activity.”
He smiles as he adds: “It’s not lost on me how incredibly lucky I am, battle scars and all, to even be able to stand up straight. I had to learn how to walk again after the cancer, same with the same quadruple heart-bypass, because it was so severe on my body. I told James, ‘You’re basically me, 20 years ago, when I was in my thirties, when I was looking happy and healthy and I could wear what I wanted.’ These days, that’s just not true.
“It’s literally the two of us embracing each other on that dancefloor and making something really beautiful and moving out of it. I didn’t know I would get so emotional until I started to do it. I nearly burst out crying. I had such a lot of grief and a lot of awful things happen to my body.
“But my body has been so good to me. It’s let me recover. I’m making peace with my past, an horrendous 10 years, my fifties were horrendous. I can’t wait to embrace my sixties.”
While he got an impressive score of 23 on the first week, Brian admits that he wasn’t fully aware of it as he “went into my own world”.
“I was really knocked out thinking about the people sitting at home who had lost their confidence after having to have a colonoscopy bag or a urinoscopy bag or a heart bypass. You put on a brave face and you go, ‘I’m fine. I’ll be totally fine.’ But inside, you’re terrified to go to the end of the road or to walk too fast or fall over, the things you used to do.”
Dancing with the Stars airs Sundays at 6:30pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player
