Julia Stiles Brings ’10 Things I Hate About You’ Cast Together to Honor Heath Ledger in Emotional DWTS Dedication Night Tribute

The ballroom went quiet on Tuesday night. Not the tense, waiting-for-the-scores quiet — the real kind, the kind where thousands of people all seem to be holding the same breath at once.

Julia Stiles stepped onto the Dancing With the Stars floor for Dedication Night, the week every season when the celebrity cast performs for the person who shaped their life. She danced for someone she hasn't spoken to in nearly two decades. Someone the whole world lost too soon.

She danced for Heath Ledger.

And by the end of the night, she wasn't alone on that floor. Far from it.

A Dance 27 Years in the Making

Stiles, paired with pro partner Ezra Sosa, performed a contemporary routine set to "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" by Frankie Valli. If that song choice rings a bell, it should. It's the same song Heath Ledger's Patrick Verona used to serenade her character Kat Stratford in the middle of a stadium in 1999's 10 Things I Hate About You — the paintball-date, marching-band, bleachers scene that has lived in a permanent loop in rom-com history ever since.

Only this time there was no marching band. No paintball splatter. Just Julia, Ezra, and a song that clearly still hurts a little to hear.

When the routine ended, the show cut to a photo of Heath on the big screen behind her. An emotional voice message from Julia played over the speakers as she looked up at the image and placed a single rose on a stair.

Then the doors at the edge of the stage opened, and out they came: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, Andrew Keegan, Susan May Pratt, and Gabrielle Union — her co-stars from the film, together on one stage for what might be the first full-cast reunion of its kind. They gathered around her, and the ballroom turned into something closer to a family gathering than a TV competition.

It was, by any measure, the moment of the season so far.

"Hey Dude"

The emotion wasn't manufactured for the cameras. In her rehearsal package before the performance, Stiles sounded like someone who'd been ambushed by her own memories.

"I learned a lot from Heath… It was so easy with him. I have so many great memories. I really wish I could pick up the phone, and be like, 'Hey dude,'" she said.

She'd been bracing herself for this one, apparently. Talking to People before the episode aired, she admitted the whole thing hit harder than she expected.

"I'm actually surprised at how emotional it's been," she said. "I know from watching the show how emotional Dedication Night is. It's always very personal stories. But I thought, 'Oh, I'm distanced enough from it. The movie was so many years ago.' But something about watching clips from that movie, seeing our pictures, hearing our voices is bringing up a lot."

She added: "I really feel how important it is to honor him. He lives on because his performance in that film was so incredible."

You can see why it blindsided her. Stiles was barely eighteen when she filmed 10 Things I Hate About You. Heath was nineteen. They were kids making a teen movie nobody thought would matter much — and it ended up being one of the defining films of their generation.

The Movie That Made Them

For anyone who didn't grow up quoting it: 10 Things I Hate About You was a modern-day spin on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, dropped right into the golden age of the teen rom-com. 1999 was stacked — She's All That, American Pie, Cruel Intentions — and this one stood apart anyway.

Ledger played Patrick Verona, the Australian transfer student with the bad reputation and the soft center. Stiles played Kat Stratford, the sharp-tongued, college-bound feminist who had zero interest in being anybody's project. The film's whole engine was the slow thaw between them, and the actors played it like they'd been sparring for years.

The stadium serenade — Patrick hiring the marching band to blast "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" across the bleachers while Kat tries to disappear into her seat — became one of those scenes that outlives its movie. People who have never seen the full film know that scene. It worked because Ledger sold it completely: the swagger, the grin, the total lack of embarrassment. That's what star quality looked like before he ever wore a purple coat and smeared makeup.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt played Cameron, the sweet kid pining for Kat's younger sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik). Andrew Keegan was Joey Donner, the smarmy model-type. Susan May Pratt played Mandella, Kat's best friend, and Gabrielle Union was Chastity, Bianca's pal. A genuinely stacked young cast — and most of them were back on that stage Tuesday night.

A Legacy That Outgrew the Rom-Com

Of course, Heath Ledger didn't stay a teen heartthrob for long. He went on to A Knight's Tale, then the career-defining turn in Brokeback Mountain that earned him an Oscar nomination, and then the Joker in The Dark Knight — a performance so ferocious it won him the Academy Award after his death.

He died in January 2008, at twenty-eight. The Dark Knight arrived in theaters that summer, and the world got to watch, in real time, what it had lost.

That's what makes tributes like Tuesday's so quietly devastating. Every time one of his old co-stars talks about him, you're reminded of the same thing: the easy charm, the phone call you can't make, the decades of performances that never happened.

Stiles has said before that working with him felt effortless. On the DWTS floor, dancing to their song, you could see she'd been carrying that grief in a pocket somewhere for a long time — and finally set it down for three minutes.

The Night Itself

Dedication Night is always the emotional peak of a DWTS season, but this year's edition landed harder than most. Week six of the competition is usually when the field starts thinning and the stakes get sharp. Not this time.

Because it was Dedication Night, nobody went home. All ten couples are safe through to week seven, and this week's scores carry over — so the leaderboard tension just keeps building into next week's show.

It's worth saying, too, that Stiles has been quietly having a season. Just last week she recreated a dance from Save the Last Dance, her 2001 hit — another film where she played a girl who refused to fit the box people put her in. Between that, the Bourne franchise's Nicky Parsons, her run on Dexter, and years of stage work, she's had the kind of career that doesn't need a ballroom to prove anything.

She's dancing anyway. And on Tuesday, she danced for him.

Some dances on that show are just dances — a foxtrot here, a paso doble there, scores and paddle drama. This one wasn't. It was a reunion, a thank-you, and maybe a goodbye she never quite got to say. Twenty-seven years after a stadium serenade that nobody involved could have known would become legend, the song played again.

And this time, the whole cast showed up to hear it.

Source: Just Jared