Jason Mraz Missed Cat So Much While on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ That He Begged Friends Not to Vote for Him

Who wants to dance with the stars when you can cuddle up with a cat? Jason Mraz asked himself this question last year as he ascended the leaderboard week after week on the 32nd season of Dancing With the Stars , according to an interview he gave on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast . Every week he succeeded, his terror mounted to the point that he begged his friends and the show’s producers to get him home to his cat.

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The thought of missing his cat was still so vexing that when he thought about it while speaking with Ferguson, he choked out a 50-word run-on sentence. “Two or three weeks in, I realized I’m probably going to be here the whole time, and I’m terrified, and I have to cancel all my plans for the entire rest of the year, and I’m missing my cat terribly, and I start telling my friends, ‘Stop voting for me,'” he said, barely breathing. “The only way I can get off the show is if I don’t get enough votes. I even told the producers, ‘I’m good. I can go home now. Thank you so much for the honor.’ They said, ‘We can’t do anything about you being here.'”

But at the end of each episode, he did better and better until a solution dawned on him. “The only thing I could do is ask friends to vote for someone else,” he said.

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Fixing the votes didn’t work, though, and Mraz, who recently released a single called “I Feel Like Dancing,” made it all the way to the end. He tied scores with Vanderpump Rules star Ariana Madix, but both lost to actress Xochitl Gomez. “Having made it all the way to the very end, made it to the buzzer, I look back and laugh and think, ‘Well, maybe if I’d actually given a shit … ‘ So I would do it all over again if I could,” he said. “I would try really hard.”

Despite Mraz’s feline ardor, his Instagram feed features no pinned photos of his kitty. There’s one from Dancing With the Stars , though.

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