PureDWTS All Stars Tony Dovolani And Melissa Rycroft Fighting Spirit And More

MSN TV spoke with Melissa Rycroft about what’s ahead for her and Tony as they head into a double elimination week. Melissa talks of how her and Tony are reinventing themselves in this take….

MSN TV: You’re going into the third week of competition. What do you think the most challenging element will be for the week ahead?

Melissa Rycroft: I think it’s just going to be reinventing ourselves. The competition started as such a high level, and now we have a double elimination, and after, I think I can say, the shocking elimination last week, we’re all on our toes. You never know what can happen. I think we spent extra time in the studio yesterday just trying to put everything we can into this Week 3 routine to make it to Week 4.

Knowing there’s going to be a double elimination next week, does that change the way you prepare for Monday’s dance at all?

Definitely. None of us actually knew that this double elimination was going to be this soon. We knew there was going to be one later this season. So when we heard it was next week, we all kind of panicked up in the red room going, “Oh my gosh. It’s next week! Did we pick the right song? Do we have the right dance now?” Again, I think what we saw last week is how big the audience impact is on the show because the bottom two of the night were not the bottom two on the leaderboard, so you’re going in with that in the back of your mind, going, “I need my dance scores to be high enough to compensate for any audience vote.” It’s intimidating going into a double-elimination week.

What dance are you and Tony working on for this week?

Tony and I are going to be doing the samba, which is a fun one.

And I love her spirit in reply to this question!! She’s a fighter. I love it.

If you had to pick a couple to win “Dancing With the Stars: All-Stars,” who would it be?

Me [and Tony]! [Laughs] Hello?! You know what, this is going to be a hard battle for everyone this season. Dance-wise I think right off the bat Sabrina and Louis have obviously proved that they’re a powerhouse and they’re going to be tough to beat, and the same with Shawn and Derek. Then you have the charisma of people like Emmitt Smith and Gilles Marini. All you can do is go week to week going, “I hope I’m in the mix. I hope I’m enough.” It’s going to be tough to beat them, but it’s my goal to make it to the finals. So we’ll see.

You can read the full interview at MSN TV.

Also, below is Tony talking on Dancing With The Stars, Melissa, and more with WMJI. Note how he won’t answer questions on past partner Kate Gosselin. Such a class act.

Picture above from Tony Dovolani Facebook. So cute!