‘Dancing With the Stars’: Last Night’s Highest Score Revealed

Week 2 of Dancing With the Star‘s 28th season kicked off on Monday night, with the new crop of stars bringing their best moves to the dance floor. As always, one star scored the highest, and this week it was former Bachelorette Hannah Brown.

Brown and partner Alan Bersten performed a Viennese waltz to Taylor Swift’s “Lover,” scoring a 24/30 from the judges and earning her the first “eights” of Season 28. In addition, the duo had the highest two-week total with 44/60 points.

“You whisked me away into another world,” judge Carrie Ann Inaba told her during Monday’s show. Bruno Tonioli agreed, adding, “That was pretty amazing. I was transported into a romantic dream. Fantastic.” “You had lovely musicality through your arms,” shared head judge Len Goodman. “For me … best dance of the night.”

“As a Swiftie, I was really feelin’ it,” Brown told Entertainment Tonight after receiving her marks. “Maybe that’s why I feel like I did good!”

“It feels really great, but there’s still hopefully a lot left of the season to go,” she added of the achievement. “So I just want to keep improving and improving. I think James [Van Der Beek] is amazing.”

Brown’s high score has deemed her an early frontrunner for the season, but the former pageant queen admitted during a recent appearance on the Bachelor Party podcast that her busy life can make it difficult for her to focus on dance practice.

“That’s the thing that’s so hard right now. All these things are coming at me, like oh you should talk to this person, you need to talk to this person, hey you have a phone call with this person, and I’m like damn, I’m just trying to learn a Cha-Cha right now,” she said.

The Alabama native also discussed her fear of failure, sharing that she’s doing her best to learn from the times things don’t work out how she had envisioned.

“There’s a way you could look at my season [of The Bachelorette] and it’s like, oh, well she did win, but there’s a way to look at it and it failed in the typical way,” she said. “So it’s like, OK, it failed, but what did I learn? I think that’s the way that I look at it now.”

The 24-year-old added that she wouldn’t change anything, because “the way that it happened was how it was supposed to happen,” but that doesn’t make it any easier to go through.

“What I expected life to be is not,” Brown said. “It’s better in a lot of ways, but that is overwhelming, and so I get overwhelmed, so I have my breakdowns. I will stare at a well, yes I will. I will lay on the ground.”

Photo Credit: Getty / Allen Berezovsk