Long before her Dancing With the Stars tenure, Lindsay Arnold made a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in the High School Musical franchise.
“That was the highlight of my childhood,” Arnold, 30, said during a recent episode of the “Lightweights” podcast. “I was, maybe, 14, and I got to get paid. I think I got paid literally $50 for, like, three full days, but that was the coolest thing ever.”
Arnold was a background extra in High School Musical 2, which aired on Disney Channel in 2007. She later made another brief appearance as a dancer in 2008’s High School Musical 3: Senior Year. Both films, as well as the OG 2006 DCOM, were filmed in Arnold’s native Utah.
“I was like, ‘I’m getting paid to dance, like what? I would do this for free.’ Then, being able to tell my friends I was going to be in High School Musical was pretty cool,” Arnold recalled. “I was in the second movie. So, the first movie had already come out and had its whole thing.”
Arnold never filmed a scene with then-crush Zac Efron or Vanessa Hudgens, though did get to work alongside fellow stars Ashley Tisdale and Lucas Grabeel.
“That was a really, crazy cool moment as a young dancer,” Arnold gushed.
Arnold grew up training and competing in ballroom dance in Utah. By 18, she tried out for So You Think You Can Dance season 8 and finished in the Top 8. Soon after, Arnold was hired as a pro on DWTS.
“Dancing With the Stars called, and they were like, ‘We want you to do this season,’ so I pushed [college] back again,” Arnold recalled during a 2022 episode of the “Trading Secrets” podcast. “Then, I think after that first season of Dancing With the Stars, I realized, like, ‘Oh, maybe I don’t need to go to college right now.’ … It just fell into place.”
Her first season aired in March 2013, when she was partnered with boxer Victor Ortiz during season 16. The following year, she was “demoted” to the troupe.
“I just was not ready,” she added at the time. “Honestly, that was probably one of the hardest parts of my career even though it’s such an incredible job; it’s an amazing job. … I needed to find out who I was, first of all. And, what’s interesting is, when I say to you that it is a different kind of work, but you put in more hours on troupe sometimes than you do as a professional. It’s a total pay cut.”
Arnold went on to win DWTS season 25 with actor Jordan Fisher. She has since left the show, focusing on raising her two young daughters with husband Sam Cusick in Utah.
