This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
Whitney Leavitt spent her first season on Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” getting branded the group’s villain, the woman fans loved to argue about on Twitter threads and TikTok comment sections.
Instead of shrinking from that reputation, she has spent the last year turning it into rocket fuel.
The 32-year-old MomTok breakout rode a headline-making run on “Dancing With the Stars” straight into a Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in “Chicago,” a role that reportedly helped deliver the show’s biggest weekly box office haul in 29 years.
Now she is stepping away from the reality series that made her famous, starring in and executive-producing her first movie, launching a production company with her husband, Conner, and gearing up for a second Broadway run, playing Sandra Dee opposite Jeremy Jordan in “Just in Time.”
It is, by any measure, one of the more unexpected pivots reality television has produced in recent memory, and Leavitt is not shy about naming the driving force behind it: the people who doubted her.
From MomTok’s Most Polarizing Star to the Ballroom Floor
Leavitt’s introduction to a national audience was rocky by design. Across the first season of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” she clashed repeatedly with castmates including Taylor Frankie Paul, Jessi Ngatikura and Demi Engemann, stepped away from the group’s chat, and then bristled when she found herself excluded from plans.
Viewers responded loudly, labeling her selfish, dramatic and, most memorably, the show’s villain. Leavitt has since acknowledged she understood exactly what she was signing up for when she agreed to be filmed in the first place.
She told Playbill that getting on the platform meant accepting a trade-off, explaining that everyone has a price to pay and that she knew what hers was going into it, adding with a wink that the arrangement helped her create some genuinely entertaining television.
That willingness to play along with an unflattering edit paid off in an unlikely way. When Leavitt was cast on season 34 of “Dancing With the Stars,” her “DWTS” castmate Andy Richter recalled asking her directly about her reputation.
According to Richter’s account to Entertainment Weekly, when he told her he had heard she was the villain of her show, she shot back simply, “Well, villains get paid.”
Richter went on to describe her as one of the warmest, most encouraging people on set, someone who made him feel like a valued part of the cast from the moment they met.
Her professional dance partner, Mark Ballas, offered a similar read on the shift in public perception, telling TooFab that Leavitt simply got to be herself on the ballroom floor, free of the editing choices that shaped her reality TV persona.
The DWTS run itself was a rollercoaster. Leavitt consistently landed near the top of the judges’ leaderboard for weeks, only to be eliminated in the semifinals, a result many fans and fellow competitors considered surprising given her scores.
She was candid about the toll that online hostility took during the competition, telling reporters she had grown somewhat desensitized to hate after years of reality fame but found it harder to watch Ballas absorb similar treatment for the first time.
Even so, she credited the show with reigniting a dream that predated her reality career entirely. Leavitt has said she trained as a dancer growing up and later earned a fine arts degree, and that performing had always been the actual goal, with reality television simply the unexpected route that got her there.
Roxie Hart, Record-Breaking Grosses and a Broadway Debut Years in the Making
Two days after her DWTS elimination, Leavitt was flown to New York City to audition in person for the role of Roxie Hart in the long-running Broadway revival of “Chicago.”
She landed the part within 24 hours of that audition, a turnaround she has described as dizzying, and the first person she told was Ballas, who had encouraged her to keep pushing throughout the competition.
Her Broadway debut opened February 2, 2026, at the Ambassador Theatre, initially booked as a six-week limited engagement running through mid-March.
The internet, predictably, had questions about whether a reality star and social media influencer could actually sing and dance her way through one of musical theater’s signature roles.
Leavitt answered those questions with results rather than arguments. Producers extended her run not once but twice, stretching what was supposed to be a six-week engagement into roughly three months on stage, with her final performance landing May 3, 2026.
During that stretch, the production notched its highest weekly box office gross in 29 years, pulling in more than $ 1.4 million in a single week, according to figures reported during her run.
Ballas even joined her onstage for a portion of the engagement, reprising his own Broadway background by stepping into the role of Billy Flynn opposite her Roxie.
Describing the character in an interview, Leavitt called Roxie sassy, impulsive and always learning, three traits she said she personally related to.
Reflecting on the DWTS-to-Broadway pipeline, Leavitt described the dance competition as genuinely life-changing, even while admitting the phrase felt a little dramatic every time she said it out loud.
She has framed the entire stretch, from the villain edit to the ballroom to the Ambassador Theatre marquee, as proof that public skepticism never actually stopped her from working toward what she wanted.
That framing has become something of a personal mission statement for Leavitt, who has repeatedly said in various interviews that she expects to always have critics and has simply gotten better at letting that criticism sharpen her focus rather than derailing it.
Leaving MomTok Behind for a Production Company, a Movie and Another Broadway Marquee
The most significant announcement of Leavitt’s run came during her final “Chicago” performance in early May, when she confirmed she is departing “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” after its upcoming fifth season.
The news effectively closes the reality television chapter that first made her famous, though it comes as no surprise given how much of her energy has shifted toward scripted and produced entertainment over the past year.
She is not leaving the industry so much as reorganizing her place in it, trading the unscripted drama of MomTok for projects she has more creative control over.
That shift is most visible in Leavitt Media House, the production company she launched this year with her husband, Conner Leavitt.
The company is described as developing both scripted and unscripted projects, and it represents the couple’s first formal step into producing rather than simply appearing in front of cameras.
Around the same time, Leavitt began work on her first feature film, “All for Love,” a holiday romantic comedy from Ninth House Productions in which she both stars and serves as executive producer.
In the film, she plays Winona, a podcaster searching for love online who falls for a renovator, Jesse Kove, after he takes on a project for her grandmother. The movie is set for a 2026 holiday release and marks her first credited acting role outside of reality television and one prior short film.
As if that slate were not full enough, Leavitt announced in August that she is returning to Broadway for a second run, this time as Sandra Dee in “Just in Time,” the Bobby Darin biomusical currently starring Jeremy Jordan.
The limited engagement is set to begin December 1, 2026, at the Circle in the Square Theatre and run for roughly six weeks into early January 2027, landing squarely in the lucrative holiday theater season.
The role marks her second major Broadway credit in under a year and puts her opposite a cast that includes Jordan as Darin along with Olivia Holt, Tony winner Debbie Gravitte, and several other Broadway veterans.
Producers are reportedly hoping Leavitt can replicate the box office bump she brought to “Chicago,” where grosses have cooled noticeably since her departure from that production in May.
Taken together, the last twelve months tell a story that goes well beyond a reality star simply finding success elsewhere. Leavitt has methodically converted a reputation built on controversy into a broader entertainment identity that spans television, competitive dance, Broadway, film and now production.
She has said plainly that she does not expect the criticism to ever fully disappear, and that she has stopped trying to make it disappear.
Instead, by her own account, she treats every doubter as one more reason to keep showing up, whether that means a dance floor, a Broadway stage or a film set she now partly owns.
For a woman once defined almost entirely by other people’s opinions of her, that shift in framing might be the most notable career move of all.
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