Past contestants came out to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Dancing With the Stars, including General Hospital’s Kelly Monaco (ex-Sam), who soap fans haven’t seen on their television screens since her final episode aired over a year ago, on November 1, 2024. Viewers will remember Monaco as the winner of the very first season of Dancing With the Stars back in 2005, and she returned to compete in the all-stars season in 2012, where she placed third.
Dancing Machine
While some former mirrorball trophy winners took to the dance floor for the special 20th anniversary episode that aired on November 11, Monaco was not one of them. She was, however, seen in the audience sitting next to season six winner Kristi Yamaguchi. Soap fans also spotted season five contestant Cameron Mathison (Drew, GH) and season 29’s Chrishell Stause (ex-Jordan, Days of Our Lives; ex-Amanda, All My Children) during the show.
Two years after she joined the cast of GH as Sam McCall, Monaco was tapped by ABC to participate in the inaugural season of DWTS, based on the hit UK series Strictly Come Dancing. “The first season was only six episodes,” Monaco recalled to Entertainment Weekly in July. “It was a test run, and I was like, ‘I’m not going to tell anyone I’m doing it and hopefully, I get voted off first and no one will ever see it.’”
Paired with professional dancer Alec Mazo, Monaco’s first dance, a Waltz to Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing,” received extremely poor marks. “I was horrified by the comments from the judges, and I got the lowest score, I think, ever, in the history of Dancing With the Stars,” the actress said of the moment that completely changed her attitude towards the show. “I was like, ‘Okay, it’s on. We’re going in and we’re doing this.’ Then I took it seriously, and I was all in at that point.”
Emerging as the victor of that first season of DWTS wasn’t Monaco’s only triumph. She also found that participating in the reality series actually helped her standing with GH viewers as well. “People saw me, Kelly, and got to know me, and they were able to differentiate between me and the character,” the actress shared with Soap Opera Digest in 2023. “I swear to you, from the first airing of Dancing With the Stars, almost overnight, it was a switch in support, because then I wasn’t Sam, the person who broke up Sonny and Carly, the person who slept with Jax — they actually saw me as, ‘’Oh, that’s Kelly over here, and that’s the character she plays over there.’ Breaking the fourth wall, sometimes that works out badly for people, but for me, it worked in my favor, and I think I was able to gain some respect from the audience and they didn’t think I was, like, this trashy whore who was sleeping with her stepfather [laughs].”
Monaco’s exit from GH last year after a 21-year, Daytime Emmy-nominated run as Sam caused a giant uproar among fans, who campaigned ceaselessly for the show to reverse its decision to kill off the beloved character. Since filming Sam’s tragic death at the hands of Cyrus Renault (Jeff Kober), Monaco has kept a pretty low profile, even on social media. Her last Instagram post was on March 13 and promoted her upcoming Bad Bunnies podcast with fellow actress, one-time Playboy Playmate and DWTS alum Shanna Moakler. However, in July, Moakler revealed that their podcast was not happening after all, because, she explained, Monaco was “dealing with some personal things.
