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Jennifer Grey Shares Shocking Secret About The ‘Dirty Dancing’ Lift

By Treva Bowdoin
Published on: 08:56 PST, Oct 16, 2015

Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze’s final Dirty Dancing dance sequence performed to “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” has become one of the most beloved movie scenes of all time, and one of the moments from the routine that really stands out to fans is the lift they perform. Anyone who has seen the scene might think that it took tons of takes for Jennifer and Patrick to perfectly execute the lift, but Jennifer recently revealed that this wasn’t the case.

In Dirty Dancing, Baby and Johnny don’t nail the lift until they perform the final dance at the end of the movie. They spend a lot of time working on the difficult move, and they even practice the maneuver in the lake. However, Jennifer Grey says that she and Patrick Swayze were no Johnny and Baby — they nailed the lift the first time they tried it, and they didn’t have to spend any time at all practicing the move for the 1987 movie.

During an interview with the Guardian, Jennifer talked about her dirty little Dirty Dancing secret.

“God, no! I only did it on the day I shot it,” Grey responded when asked if she’s done the lift since starring in Dirty Dancing. “Never rehearsed it, never done it since. I don’t know how all these people who re-enact it have the guts to throw themselves into the arms of anyone other than Patrick Swayze. It’s insane!”

Jennifer Grey relived the time in her life that included lots of dancing when she competed on Season 11 of Dancing with the Stars in 2010. The actress and her pro partner, Derek Hough, used a mixture of talent and nostalgia to win the show’s coveted mirrorball trophy, and they didn’t even have to do the lift. Instead, they paid homage to Dirty Dancing and late actor Patrick Swayze by performing a Viennese Waltz to a song that was played during the movie, Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.”

According to Grey, the Dancing with the Stars producers were pretty desperate to get her to recreate the lift scene with Derek, but the 55-year-old felt like she was too old to be held up over someone’s head.

“How about every day?” she responded when she was asked if she was ever asked to do the lift on DWTS. “It’s a non-starter. It happened, enjoy it, watch it over and over again but never ask me to do it again because I’m too f**king old… I have a family and I want to live longer [laughs].”

Even though Jennifer Grey thinks that people are “insane” to try the Dirty Dancing lift, she did recently give her former DWTS partner a few tips on how to do it. As the Inquisitr previously reported, Bindi Irwin and Derek Hough are going to try to recreate the final Dirty Dancing sequence during next Monday’s episode of DWTS, and they’re spending a lot more time working on it than Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze did. Derek revealed that he and Bindi got to talk to Jennifer during their rehearsal on Thursday, so maybe she gave the daughter of the Crocodile Hunter some advice on how to keep calm while she’s being held so high up in the air.

According to E! News, Bindi Irwin and Derek Hough are so determined to get the dance move right that they recreated another famous Dirty Dancing scene while prepping for Monday night’s show. Just like Baby and Johnny, the partners headed to a nearby lake to practice their lifts. However, Bindi looked like she was doing a better job staying up in the air than Baby did.

In his autobiography, The Time of My Life, Patrick Swayze revealed that he hated that lake scene.

“It was horrifyingly, hypothermically cold in that lake, and we filmed that scene over and over,” the late actor wrote, according to the Telegraph. “And despite the fact that Jennifer was very light, when you’re lifting someone in water, even the skinniest little girl can feel like 500 pounds.”

At least things got easier when Patrick and Jennifer Grey filmed the climactic closing dance sequence — Baby finally kept her core as stiff as a board and soared.

[Featured Image: Mark Sagliocco/Getty]

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