Mark Ballas Reveals Horrifying Experience Preparing For Zombie Dance With Sadie Robertson

Mark Ballas and Sadie Robertson embraced America’s obsession with The Walking Dead by doing a creepy zombie routine on the October 27 episode of Dancing with the Stars. However, for Mark Ballas, the scariest part of the performance came before he ever shambled into the ballroom, and his experience was reminiscent of a very famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

In a recent Hollywood Life post, Mark Ballas wrote about becoming one of the walking dead for Dancing with the Stars. It was his first time making it to the show’s Halloween episode, so he wanted to make his dance with Sadie Robertson super-spooky. This meant adding a graveyard set, flooding the dance floor with fog and wearing an elaborate zombie costume. To make sure that he looked as freaky as possible, Mark decided to wear contact lenses that completed whited out his irises. Unfortunately for Ballas, putting the lenses in was a real nightmare.

“It was really hard for me to put my contact lenses in — I have a phobia about my eyes, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do it or not!” Mark revealed. “They ended up hiring a professional to clamp my eyes open and stick in the contacts!”

It’s kind of scary that you can rent guys to clamp your eyes open a la A Clockwork Orange.

Mark Ballas went on to explain how his creepy contact lenses almost ruined his performance.

“In dress rehearsal, it was super smooth, but in the live show, I was blind for about 15 minutes. I couldn’t see a thing! We ended up changing them and I could see again, but I was prepared to go out there and do the routine without being able to see, but luckily they fixed it!”

Mark Ballas and Sadie Robertson received a score of 30 out of 40 points, which wasn’t terrible. However, Mark was upset that Halloween-themed routine wasn’t a bigger hit with the judges. Ballas wrote that the judges could have cut Sadie a little more slack and that he disagreed with their assessment that there wasn’t enough “Paso content” in the dance. However, it’s the most-watched dance of the week on the DWTS YouTube page with over 100,000 views, so obviously the audience loved it.

Still, it was probably hard for Mark to hear the judges’ harsh critiques after he worked so hard on the zombie number. And Ballas doesn’t just have to come up with dance routines and teach them to Sadie Robertson — sometimes he also has to act like a surrogate dad to the 17-year-old Duck Dynasty star.

As E! News reports, Sadie Robertson’s father Willie usually approves her DWTS costumes to make sure that they aren’t too sexy. However, this week Mark revealed that he played dad by helping Sadie choose an age-appropriate jester costume for the team dance.

“We wanted to create, for each character, something memorable from the circus…she was like a female version of the jester and I think this is really appropriate and cute.”

Do you think Sadie Robertson and Mark Ballas should have received higher scores for their petrifying Paso Doble?

[Images via Mark Ballas/Instagram, Warner Bros.]