15 Slammin’ Secrets of Save the Last Dance

4. Her counterpart had to put in work as well. At the time, Sean Patrick Thomas was a 31-year-old actor with a handful of film credits who had barely seen the inside of a studio. “I didn’t have dance experience, except for some aerobics dance classes, and I had to dance at the final audition,” he recalled in an interview with Nitrate Online. “Usually, with any type of choreography, you have to learn it and practice it. I didn’t have that chance—they taught it to me that morning. I did the best I could.” 

He continued putting in the work after he was cast. “I’m not a dancer at all, I’m just a regular person,” he explained to E! News in 2021. “And so I was anxious for the opportunity to not screw it up when it came to filming. So if they were going to come and teach me stuff, I was very eager for it because I was so afraid of looking like a complete dork. So I didn’t feel like it was extra work in the sense of, like, ‘Oh god, I gotta do this again.’ I was more like, ‘Give me more, give me more, give me more, because I can’t screw this up.'”