Bruno Tonioli, the Dancing with the Stars judge who now has to play the game

Bruno Tonioli

Photo: MrDoctorWho6 / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 25, 1955 Ferrara
Occupation	Dancer

For more than twenty years Bruno Tonioli has been paid to sit on the far side of a dance floor and react. He leaps out of his chair, reaches for a metaphor nobody else on the panel would risk, and hands a celebrity’s foxtrot a verdict that sounds half like opera and half like a football chant. On Dancing with the Stars he and Carrie Ann Inaba are the only judges who have been there since the first episode. This week the arrangement flips. In The Mob, Hulu‘s new reality competition, he moves into an Italian villa as one of twelve celebrity contestants, and somebody else gets to decide whether he stays. The man who has graded thousands of routines is, for once, the one being judged.

The flamboyance can make it easy to forget that he arrived at the judging table from the working end of the business. Tonioli was born in Ferrara, in northern Italy, and danced professionally long before he ever talked about dancing on television. He reached London as a leading member of La Grande Eugène, a Paris-based company, went on to join the Lindsay Kemp Company, and has made the city his home ever since. He has spoken publicly about the homophobic bullying he suffered as a boy, and about being gay, without turning either into a brand.

His first brush with prime time was a near miss. In 1980, five years after he settled in London, as part of the group Duke and the Aces, he performed in the BBC‘s selection show for the Eurovision Song Contest and did not win. The career that followed was quieter and far more durable. In the years that followed he choreographed music videos, stage shows and tours for Tina Turner, Sting, the Rolling Stones, Freddie Mercury, Boy George, Duran Duran and Bananarama, and staged the video for Arcadia’s “Election Day”. He can be seen dancing in Elton John’s video for “I’m Still Standing”, released in 1983. Television work followed on Not the Nine O’Clock News, French and Saunders, Absolutely Fabulous and Top of the Pops, and in cinema he was Anne Hathaway‘s choreographer on Ella Enchanted.

That last credit came out in 2004, the same year the BBC built a judging panel for a new celebrity ballroom show. Strictly Come Dancing sat him beside Len Goodman, Arlene Phillips and Craig Revel Horwood, and the casting worked because the four men and women disagreed in different registers: Goodman the ballroom traditionalist, Revel Horwood the acid, Tonioli the excitable Italian who scored with his whole body. A year later ABC launched its American version, Dancing with the Stars, and hired him again, with Goodman and Inaba. For more than a decade he flew between the two, and in series 16 and 17 the schedules clashed so badly that Alfonso Ribeiro had to sit in for him in London for a week.

The obvious objection to the routine is that the performance of the verdict is louder than the verdict. A Tonioli comment is built to be clipped and shared, and it is fair to ask how much technical guidance a contestant can take from a judge whose notes arrive as extravagant similes. The answer is more than the clips suggest, because behind the volume sits a choreographer who spent years deciding where dancers stand, when they move and what the camera sees. The persona also has limits. When he sang the Communards’ “Don’t Leave Me This Way” on the Strictly Christmas special in 2022, the reaction was mixed, a reminder that the persona does not transfer to every stage.

The pandemic forced the choice he had been postponing. In 2020, stranded in the United States by travel restrictions, he missed the whole Strictly series in the studio and appeared by video link in the Sunday results shows. In June 2021 the BBC announced that Anton Du Beke would take his seat, and in May 2022 it confirmed he would not return. The British panel he had helped define went on without him; the American one kept him.

Britain got him back for a while. He finished third on the second series of The Masked Dancer in 2022, disguised as the Pearly King, and in January 2023 ITV announced that he would replace David Walliams on Britain’s Got Talent, next to Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Alesha Dixon. He stayed three series. On 1 September 2025 he confirmed on Instagram that he could not do the next one because of his prior commitment to Dancing with the Stars, and KSI took the chair. It was the second time the American show’s calendar had pulled him off a British panel.

The side projects say something about where his attention drifts when he is off the panel. He chose the songs for An Italian Romance, a 2016 Decca compilation of Italian recordings, presented Bruno Tonioli at the Opera for BBC Radio 2 in 2018, and in 2021 drove around Britain with Craig Revel Horwood, his old sparring partner from the Strictly panel, on Craig and Bruno’s Great British Road Trips. He speaks five languages and keeps homes in London and Los Angeles, a split that has defined his working life for two decades.

At 70 he shows no sign of wanting to give up the American chair. Dancing with the Stars began its 35th season on 15 September 2026 with Tonioli, Inaba and Derek Hough on the panel, and the show arrived at this year’s Emmys as a nominee. “Until they want me, I’ll be there,” he told E! News before the season started, comparing the live show to “doing a Broadway show” for the instant feedback it gives him.

The Mob premieres on Hulu, and on Disney+ outside the United States, on 26 October 2026, with new episodes weekly. Parker Posey hosts, Studio Lambert, the company behind The Traitors, produces with Primal Media, and the contestants elect a don who decides who earns money and who gets whacked, with up to $250,000 at stake. Tonioli shares the villa with Joe Gorga, Debi Mazar and Aida Turturro, among others. The Dancing with the Stars final is scheduled for 24 November, the day before he turns 71; he was born on 25 November 1955. For a few weeks he will be doing both jobs at once: handing down scores on Tuesday nights, and waiting to learn his own on the streamer.

Tags: Strictly Come Dancing, Bruno Tonioli, The Mob, Dancing with the Stars, Britain's Got Talent, Carrie Ann Inaba