On this episode of Pretty Messed Up, AJ McLean, Cheryl Burke, and Rene Elizondo get into everything going on behind the scenes on Dancing With The Stars, from the struggles in rehearsal to the final scores to who they’d most want to dance with if they had to change partners. They also welcome Cheryl’s husband, Matthew Lawrence, to the show to hear about his life as a child actor, his own experiences with drugs and alcohol, how he and Cheryl met, his role in her sobriety journey, and his love of reptiles, and he tells AJ how he showed his loyalty as a Backstreet Boys fan during his days on Boy Meets World.
Matthew got into acting as a toddler because his parents and older brother were performers as well, and as a result, “I grew up so much in a bubble” that he hadn’t experimented with any drinking or partying at all until he turned 20. At that point, he got a job on a movie out of the country, and “basically tried everything I could within a month,” he laughs. But he was always able to contain it, saying that he would go out only on Wednesday nights; he also acknowledges that in his family, everything is kept very private, so his partying didn’t hit the tabloids like AJ’s did. He would only do drugs or drink heavily when he was “in a different country, in the comfort of my own home, or with people I really trusted.” And he can have a beer now and again, but isn’t really a drinker. “I don’t think he’s one of us,” Rene jokes.
He tells AJ that when he was on Boy Meets World, his co-star Danielle Fishel was dating Lance Bass from *NSync, so the band would come to the set everyday – but the guys on the show all liked Backstreet Boys. So every Friday that the band was in the audience, “we had a dance-off to ‘I Want It That Way’ in front of the audience, just to zing it to *NSync!” he laughs. The audience loved it so much they had to keep doing it. AJ wants to know how Matthew deals with Cheryl’s “whip-cracking” perfectionism at home, and what it was like to work with Robin Williams: “He was one of my idols,” he says. Plus, bearded dragons, a really dirty frog joke, and a powerful talk about mentorship; hear all this and more on this episode of Pretty Messed Up.
If you want to be sure you're listening to the podcasts everyone else is checking out, iHeartRadio has you covered. Every Monday, iHeartRadio releases a chart showing the most popular podcasts of the week. Stay up to date on what's trending by checking out the chart here. There's even a chart just for radio podcasts here, featuring all your favorite iHeartRadio personalities like Bobby Bones, Elvis Duran, Steve Harvey and dozens of others.
Photo: Getty Images