Maks Chmerkovskiy is dancing into a new chapter in his life. Ahead of the birth of his third child, Milan Maksim Chmerkovskiy, the proud boy dad exclusively told HELLO! that he and his wife, Peta Murgatroyd, were excited to welcome a new member to their family, though he laughed: “Are you ever ready to be a parent of multiple children?”
"We're also excited because we see it. You know how you can see it. You’re seeing yourself. Like I see me, my super hot wife looking fly. I look fly. We got three gorgeous sons," Maks shared with HELLO!
"This set of mental pictures that I have in my head is incredible. So just working towards these goals.”
In addition to newborn Milan, Maks and Peta are also parents to sons, Shai, seven, and Rio, who turned one last month.
“I'm looking forward to continuing being a real loving, real family that's focused on each other and building that small little community that we started from within,” the doting dad of three said.
Maks and Peta have been married since 2017. The couple, who first met on Broadway in 2009, both starred on Dancing with the Stars. While Maks hasn't competed on the ABC show since Season 25, he told HELLO! that he would be open to returning to the ballroom.
“As someone who's seen Dancing with the Stars go through ups and downs literally, and seeing the heydays and also the kind of the low days, I feel like Dancing with the Stars is now, as of last season, has made a comeback,” Maks said, noting that the TV series has survived "many different periods of time.”
The DWTS alum pointed out that the show "used to be laughed at and talked about where celebrities go to die," and then it quickly turned into a place where people go to revive their career.
"This is where they go to present themselves over again, get to speak, show struggle and for people to fall back in love with them,” Maks said. “So I do believe that Dancing with the Stars is getting back to where it used to be where people were like, ‘No, I really do want to go there.’ It's great for PR. It's great for the body. It's great for the mind, and you come out knowing how to cha cha.”
The Ukrainian-American dancer thinks the show will even “become a little more attractive to the point where we might see" a royal competing on Dancing with the Stars one day.
“It might not be, you know, [Prince] William and his brother [Prince Harry] duking it out,” Maks laughed, before adding, “By the way, I believe a lot of family drama would be solved a lot better with some kind of like a dance off.”
Although he's left the ballroom, Maks hasn't shied away from reality TV since departing Dancing with the Stars. Earlier this year, he competed on Season 2 of Peacock's The Traitors and served as a judge on So You Think You Can Dance. Maks has also been busy with projects offscreen, including launching a line of premium vodka called Tetya KAPA. The Dance With Me co-founder admitted to HELLO! that everything he does "business-wise" has "to make sense” to him.
“I realized that I just want to make products that make me happy that I love and when the time comes and it’s the right opportunity, then I'll jump on the opportunity to expand and promote,” Maks said.
“So, I don't run after success at the moment. I let it come to me.” One recent opportunity that came his way was sponsoring the ESPYS Celebrity Golf Classic. Maks noted: “That's why you come out with things. That's why you make things, so they can support bigger opportunities for some fundraising. Sign me up.”
Continue reading for more from HELLO!’s exclusive interview with Maks Chmerkovskiy, including why he wouldn't mind returning to Dancing with the Stars today, plus the mistake he made while on the show...
The cast of season 3 of Traitors was recently announced…Are you going to be watching the upcoming season?
[Laughs] If it falls into the time allocated for watching stuff in my daily, parental routine, then yes. All jokes aside, I just have literally no time for watching TV because the second I sit down, I have a child or a really pregnant wife [laughs] distract me… Somebody will always distract me from TV time nowadays. After the kids go to sleep that lasts about seven minutes before we both pass out. But I love my Traitors family. I love that I was part of a bit of an iconic kind of season at this point. I think Season 2 will be hard to beat. I know that Season 3 is already filmed. There's some people that I know that did it. I’m sure they had a great time. We'll see how it turns out.
What did you take away from that experience, your time on the show?
That I'm not good with some gameplay that involves, you know, seclusion, if you will… You’re limited on the communication with say with the family and stuff like that. My phone time with Peta was maybe like 20 minutes once in a while. So that stuff is not for me, but the gameplay itself, I loved it. I’ll give you an example. It's like when you go to somebody's house, and you're going for like a get-together just to chill and then you show up and they're like, “Hey, so we're gonna play a game of Mafia” and you’re like “These people are weird. We're adults. What are we doing?” And then you end up really liking this game… That's kind of what happened. I was going in with like "We'll see what happens" and, you know, the rest is history, but I really, really, really liked this experience.
I can imagine that was hard being away from the family. Was Peta a fan of the show, did she watch a lot?
I don't know. I honestly don't actually know. I know she watched my episodes [laughs]. I’m not sure if after I got eliminated [if] she stayed on, but it's definitely an interesting project. It's exciting to follow the trajectory of characters and how they developed. Nowadays, we're just so busy and so consumed by life. You know, [our] TV of choice is things like that, like The Traitors, the gameplay kind of shows. But Peta and I also [are] big fans of things like Love Island [laughs] where you just sit and watch somebody else's drama.
It’s fun to watch someone else's drama on TV.
Oh my god. Yeah. Especially if it's close to yours and you're like, “Oh, great. Well, let's see how they play that out” …I drag Peta into some shows. She loves the murder mystery situations and all those like reality TV documentaries about that. She would watch Jeffrey Dahmer both the Netflix series and the documentary on repeat. And for me, I'm a cartoon guy. Always have been. So Shai and I with cartoons and Peta with some adult nonsense. We kind of find middle ground on things like Love Island. We can both sit down, turn our brain off and watch.
I love that Love Island is your guys' show… How did being on Traitors compare to Dancing with the Stars?
Yeah. No, Dancing with the Stars is my job. Has always been. It's very close to the job that we have as ballroom dance professionals outside of the show... This is when you have a responsibility for another person's participation. Right? So that's a bigger responsibility than being responsible for yourself. And I actually didn't really pursue the show that way… My mistakes on Dancing with the Stars came from the fact that I wasn't following that understanding. I was following an understanding [of] everyone for themselves. So like she represents herself, I represent me. So, I would do a lot of things to my own detriment for the sake of someone else's dancing, you know?… Here on Traitors, you are you and I got to speak. That's another thing. You know, for me, I express verbally a lot and so [laughs] when I was given an opportunity, a lot of people on the cast, outside of cameras, a lot of people expressed that they didn't expect me to be positive and the beautiful things that they said because my persona coming from Dancing with the Stars was different. So that to me was a great difference, you know? That I got to be known as myself, rather than someone else's plus one for the duration of Dancing with the Stars. Having said that, is that bad? No, it's not. Dancing with the Stars should be about [the] celebrity and their journey on this project. And so, from that standpoint, had I relived my Dancing with the Stars days, [laughs] I would have probably done it differently. But that's why I enjoyed Traitors and things of that nature, shows of that sort because then you get to know who I am really.
Do you plan to return to the ballroom? Would you like to?
I mean, yeah. Why not? I would love to. Not in the sense of like, "Would I love to do Dancing with the Stars." I wouldn't mind today because my mentality’s different, my body’s different, my feelings about everything sort of life are different, and the outlook on opportunities, possibilities, the reality, the things that make you happy. I’ve done so many things today by now that, again, I have data of like what's best for me. What's best for my family. What’s best for my psyche. What’s best for my heart, my soul, not just for my pocket. And so from that standpoint, if the opportunity comes and it’s the right type of opportunity, and by that I mean, there's a reason and a need for me to be back, I would love the opportunity.
I'm sure the fans of the show would love to see you back. Now you have since returned to another dancing show, So You Think You Can Dance. How would you describe yourself as a judge? Going into [it], what kind of judge did you think you were going to be?
You know how they say everything [at] the right time? The time, timing, timing. I think the timing of my joining So You Think You Can Dance was perfect for the fact that I now have enough, let's call it that, I have enough to offer for the position that is of such importance. I have the pedigree of surviving and staying successful in a very tough industry, especially as a dancer. And so I decided that when I was offered this position and I spoke to producers as to how I want to be and how they want me to be and what kind of Maks the judge they want to see, we settled on an opportunity where I get to speak how it really is in the real world, and from the perspective of active professional working dancer, who [came] in, you know, the middle of 2000s and today 20 years later is still around and can say this is how I've done things. And most importantly, I pride myself on my shortcomings the same way I'm proud of my accomplishments because they were if not sometimes even a bigger and a better lesson. Everybody around us always say that you don't really learn anything from success as much as you learn from failures. And by that definition, I have a lot of knowledge to offer someone who’s trying to follow our footsteps, even if it's in a different dance style.
Dance is of course a big part of your life. What role does it play at home in your family life? Are there dance parties at home with the boys and Peta?
[Laughs] Yeah. We do breakout in dancing... I would love to soundtrack our life. We love the presence of music. I play. There's gotta be some kind of sound going on at all times. And so whenever the sound is fun, which is a lot of times, we do break into it… [The boys are] not really following the dancing bug. One is seven and the other one is still sort of forming as a human [laughs]. But the seven year old already said: “Papa, I don’t want to dance,” which is cool, but we still make him go to just keep that range of motion going.
Shai says that he doesn't want to dance?
No, he's not about that life.
When you guys turn on the sound at home. What's the jam? What's your go-to song?
I mean anything from the Trolls soundtrack is a very popular situation in my house. That soundtrack is fire by the way... I introduce Shai to music in general. I just want him to be well-rounded in that department. Recently we got on Beastie Boys. When he wakes up, the first thing that he wants to do is wake up, chill on the couch in the living room, which is hilarious. He’s like a grown man like “Don't bother me. I want to lay on the couch just to wake up.” Anyways… I put him on 80s and 90s MTV music videos. So he’s all into that. He can tell you every hip hop artist from the 90s, the real hip hop, as we quote unquote the old people call it. He's into AC/DC. Loves AC/DC. And I put him on Bob Marley recently, so he’s all about jamming. I try to educate with sound, and things outside of just the traditional education. Because he’s gonna learn numbers and letters… and we obviously support that, but this kind of artistic expressionism is very important to me and for him to have. So he’s into art. He’s into music. He’s into tennis, swimming, dancing and we just kind of support it all.
What do you find most rewarding about being a boy dad?
That I don't have to deal with being a girl dad. You know? Besides yeah the gorgeous, beautiful things and we were waiting. We wanted a girl, for sure. Why wouldn't we, you know? But when “it’s a boy” I'm not gonna lie to you, there was a bit of a relief because I don't know what to do with girls. I have a brother. I don’t have a sister. My mom doesn't know how to braid a hair. So we grew up [in] boy scenarios. At the moment I'm happy, but if I were to be a girl dad, it'd be incredible. Like I said, I just wouldn’t know what to do with her!
She’d have you wrapped around her finger so quickly.
That’s what everybody says. But to be honest with you, these guys have me wrapped around, too. I'm in love with my family. I love my kids… I’m in love with the time. Not having a personal life at the moment [laughs] I don't mind it. I love it… I loved being in service and I think maybe that's why the career of a customer satisfaction that I have is something that I'm excelling at… If I focus, I know how to treat a large audience, a single individual person and so I'm here to cater to my family for the rest of my life, you know, and take all these opportunities. So I'm looking forward to my boys. The time that I have with them is already incredible. Looking forward to watching them grow. I’ve always said that, you know, I can't take credit for my career. That’s my parents’. That's their credit. But I will take credit for my kids. So I better watch them grow up into what I would be proud of to take credit for because I’ll also take the fall for their shortcomings. That’s the kind of dad I want to be.
What are you looking forward to in this next chapter of life as your family grows?
Just continue building… Peta and I, we’ve found ourselves to be very good at getting on the same page when it comes to the fundamentals. Fundamentally, we just want a healthy and happy family. Fundamentally, we look forward to raising them well. Fundamentally, we are in a real loving, beautiful relationship. This is not some kind of Hollywood get together, you know? So yeah. I'm looking forward to continuing being a real loving, real family that's focused on each other and building that small little community that we started from within... Another thing, you complain about the world, I read somewhere, well, start by making better humans. This is what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to raise three boys that are better than me, in every aspect. And hopefully I'll be successful.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity