Former Dancing With the Stars partners Jan Ravnik and Jen Affleck haven’t kept in close contact since season 34 came to an end.
“We haven’t stayed in touch,” Ravnik, 31, exclusively told Us after the Tuesday, November 10, Grammy Night episode, where Affleck, 27, sat in the audience. “I went to her. I said hi. It’s good to see her.”
When asked if they had spoken amid the changes in Affleck’s life, Ravnik added, “With the season, I have so much stuff going on. I know that it’s a lot of drama around it. … But, yeah, she’s great.”
Ravnik made his debut on Dancing With the Stars season 34, where he and Affleck placed ninth. On an episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives after DWTS, husband Zac Affleck said that Ravnik is a “great guy” and “super respectful” but felt like it wasn’t his “plan A” to watch Jen dance with the pro in Disneyland.
Jen has since announced her pregnancy with baby no. 4 and filed a petition for divorce from Zac just days before appearing on season 1 of the spinoff, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County, which premieres on Thursday, November 12.
Ravnik, meanwhile, has since returned to the dancing competition for season 35 with partner Tatyana Ali. On Tuesday’s episode, the pair performed a tango to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” and received a combined score of 27 out of 30 from judges Derek Hough, Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba.
When asked why the pair initially seemed surprised by their scores, Ali explained to Us, “I mean, because you can feel one way, but then the scores could come back another way. There’s no telling.”
“It felt good, the things that the judges had to say about the performance and the dance, and then to receive those scores, it felt really good,” she said.
The pair then went head-to-head with Jenna Dewan and pro Val Chmerkovskiy for a cha cha dance-off to Maren Morris’ “The Middle,” and Ravnik and Ali ultimately lost the two additional posts from the judges. Ravnik and Ali, however, were safe from elimination and Dewan and Chmerkovskiy said goodbye to the show.
“I feel that everyone is so good in this competition at this point. It’s the semifinal, so anything can happen, right? And the judges were kind of scoring the same, so it just depends on what the public outside is voting,” he said. “So we don’t know. … It was a surprise because everyone’s so good, it can happen, anything.”
Ali chimed in to add, “I’m not taking any of it for granted.”
With the possibility of a finale freestyle in their near-future, Ravnik and Ali teased that they are starting to think about what that performance could look like.
“We’re already talking about it,” Ravnik said of their potential freestyle. “I mean, we have to. Production says that we have to talk about it. … She shared the idea. There’s a lot of ideas. We’re going to land on one, but I’m excited if we’re getting there. We’re going to still push it. I think it’s going to be incredible.”
Ali, for her part, shared that Ravnik encouraged her to “dream big” with their performance, quipping, “So I put in a lot of things.”
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
