Janette Manrara surprised Strictly Come Dancing fans when she announced she was leaving the BBC One show last summer and taking on a new presenting role on It Takes Two.
In an exclusive interview with HELLO!, the popular pro has since revealed that she had always planned on making an exit long before she actually left – and not because she didn't love her time on the dancefloor, but because she had to be pragmatic.
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"A dancer's career is so short. You can only dance at a top level for a certain amount of time. So ever since I got onto Strictly Come Dancing, I've always been thinking about what's next," said Janette.
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"I've always loved entertaining and making people smile, and I do like interviewing people and sharing their stories. So the change to go into presenting, I think, was a very slow, long process.
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"It just seems like it happened overnight but for me, it's been something I've been thinking about for a really, really long time. When Zoe Ball decided to step down from It Takes Two, the team there knew how much I wanted to go into presenting. Voila, the opportunity came, and I had to take it!"
"The girls were just so proud of me," Janette revealed of the Strictly cast's reaction
Janette, 38, also opened up about how the Strictly cast reacted to her big news. "When the announcement came for me to do It Takes Two, literally all the girls – the men as well – but especially the girls, were just so proud of me," she said. "I feel very, very lucky that I work in an environment where we really push for each other's successes because I feel the more we do that as women, the more we will all rise together."
Despite feeling like she's still a "baby" in the presenting world, the TV star did admit that her career change massively empowered her. "I'm Latina, my family's Cuban. I was born in Miami," she said. "I was the first American-born of my whole family. I learnt English in school and no one in my household really spoke English.
"There was definitely a sense of empowerment," Janette said of her career change
"My mum was the one who said, 'Janette, my daughter, my Cuban daughter from this small little town in Miami called Hialeah, is now hosting a BBC primetime TV show.'
"It was definitely a pinch-me moment and a feeling of so much pride in the hard work and dedication that I've been putting into myself, into my career, to making sure that I did it how I wanted to do it and in a way that made me feel good about me and who I am as a person. So, there was definitely a sense of empowerment."
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