Is Sabrina Carpenter Really Dancing in Netflix's 'Work It'?

Work It, Netflix‘s new teen comedy, is all about the dance moves. Sabrina Carpenter plays Quinn, a high school student striving to get into a top-tier college. To make her academic dreams come true, Quinn has to boost up her extracurriculars — so, she gets into dance, forming her own team of mismatched talent to form a powerful dance troupe and learn some creative choreography along the way.

Quinn transforms from an awkward, clumsy teen who’s told she “can’t dance,” to an elegant dancer in Work It in just an hour and a half, but is Carpenter really dancing in all of the shots we see of her character tumbling and spinning across the stage? Short answer, yes.

Carpenter told the Hollywood Reporter that she didn’t know what she was getting into with the film until they began rehearsing the dance numbers, but she called the experience “so fun and effortless,” adding, “I’ve loved dance my entire life … It was a huge part of my life and kind of what shaped me into the performer that I love being.”

The Work It actress opened up more about her dance experience and filming the Netflix comedy in an interview with PopSugar, admitting that it had been a long time since she’d last danced when they first began filming the movie. Like Quinn, it took her a little while to get into the rhythm and the moves on stage. “It was the perfect rehearsal that I didn’t know that I needed going into making it,” she explained.

For Carpenter, the most difficult part of filming the early Work It dance scenes was learning to dance like a beginner. Because Quinn is so uncomfortable with the choreography when she first starts out, Carpenter had to work even harder to convincingly stumble through the dance sequences when her character is learning how to move on stage.

“I do remember early on in rehearsals with our choreographer [Aakomon Jones] it was kind of a lot of me getting out of my body as opposed to getting into it, which was really interesting to just like find the complete version of myself that’s just off rhythm in every way possible so that it would be believable and that she would have an arc and somewhere to go that wasn’t too good at the end,” she told PopSugar. “Because I don’t think that anyone can just wake up one day and have two left feet and then automatically not have that anymore. But it was a lot of fun to dance poorly.”

Stream Work It on Netflix