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Entertainment December 28, 2016
Maddie Ziegler may be a professional dancer, but she wants to remind the world that she’s also just your average teenager.
Ziegler, who has been dancing since she was two years old, got her start on “Dance Moms” before she scored her first broke out performance dancing in Sia’s music video, “Chandelier.” Since her debut, she has secured a reoccurring role in Sia’s visual creations, appearing in four additional videos by the Aussie singer.
Ziegler’s on-screen presence isn’t just silent dance routines. She recently traded her legs for a voice in the animated film “Ballerina” and will grace the big screen again in 2017 with Naomi Watts and Sarah Silverman in “The Book of Henry.”
The 14-year-old’s résumé is certainly impressive for her young age. Yet Ziegler isn’t letting any Hollywood pressures cloud her bright-eyed, bushy-tailed attitude. Ziegler proves she’s just a quirky teenager in the trending video interview from Refinery29 seen above.
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The light-hearted video shows the dancer in her hotel room excitedly jumping on the bed, saying “I could never do this at home!” She also decorates elaborate cakes with colorful candy, sprinkles and frosting. Walking out of the hotel room, she sees two young female fans and poses with them for a selfie.
It turns out she Maddie is encouraged to channel this youthful energy during her professional gigs. Though she does have direction from Sia and her choreographer, Ryan Heffington, Ziegler says that her improvisation often makes the cut in many music videos. Her “fooling around during rehearsal and doing something crazy” turn out to be some of the best moves in the routines, she shares in an interview with BBC.
“For being 11 and competing all my life, I’ve been used to just being pretty and wearing a lot of makeup and making sure you always look good,” she told BBC. “But then for this [“Chandeleir” debut] I’ve learned to embrace that it’s okay to be weird and quirky.”
Ziegler’s latest project? A fashion line. In addition to her dancing career, she will be designing a clothing collection with younger shoppers in mind. Her line, fittingly labeled “Maddie Style,” is aimed at teenage girls. Its goal is to provide teenage girls like herself an avenue to buy stylish clothes which are wearable while still offering the mature vibe.
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“I feel like there’s never really an in-between,” Ziegler told Refinery29. “There’s really juvenile clothes or there’s something you can’t fit in because it’s too big, or something. So I wanted to make this line something that 12- or 13-year-olds can feel comfortable in, because when I was that age, I was like, ‘I don’t want to wear pink all the time anymore.’ But if I tried to wear adult clothes, it’s going to be either too big or too grown-up for me.”
Ziegler’s title of “the first digital dance star” may have propelled her to the top of the entertainment industry, but she proves that Hollywood isn’t stand in her way of being a teenager and relating to girls her age.
