Tyler Cameron is opening up about his emotional Dancing With the Stars journey with partner Sharna Burgess.
“I had no idea dance and this partnership would bring that much into me,” Cameron, 33, exclusively told Us after the Tuesday, October 6, Mariah Carey Night episode. “It has really just made me feel so much more alive, so much more just in tap with things that I haven’t felt in so long.”
Cameron noted that dance is “about expression” and “putting yourself out there,” which he finds himself “almost fully” doing in the competition.
“Dance is helping me [get] closer and closer to doing that,” he said. “It’s performing. It’s letting go and cutting loose and things that you kind of just hide as a guy your whole life, I feel like. And this has been such an incredible experience to learn that, and hopefully, when I have kids one day, I can show this to them, and you can perform, you can feel whatever you want to feel and put that off.”
After Cameron and Burgess, 41, performed a Foxtrot to “#Beautiful,” the pair received praise — and support — from the judges after the Bachelor Nation alum spoke candidly about the death of his mom, Andrea, in 2020.
“My mom would be kicking and screaming and yelling. She’d be thrilled,” Cameron told Us, while Burgess added, “Them [getting] emotional at the judges’ table was making me emotional, and then it was just an emotional thing. I’m just so proud of you, and I’m so glad we got to do that.”
Cameron and Burgess ultimately earned a combined score of 21 out of 30 from judges Carrie Ann Inaba, Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli and were safe from elimination on Tuesday. The pair are set to perform on next week’s Super Bowl-themed episode. (Summer House’s Ciara Miller and pro Brandon Armstong were sent home at the end of the episode.)
“We needed that,” Cameron said of hitting his routine on Tuesday. “We needed to finally put a dance together from beginning to end. I feel like we finally did that. It was always something with every dance we did. This is the one we completed fully, and I’m just happy all the work that we put into it, it all came together. We were very thrilled with the scores.”
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
