Australian actor and singer Johnny Ruffo made a surprise appearance during the DWTS finale last night.
Ruffo won Dancing with the Stars in 2011 with dance partner Luda Kroitor and has been fighting brain cancer since 2017.
However, the inspirational 34-year-old wasn’t willing to let his health battle stop him from taking the stage again. He made an inspirational return alongside dance partner Masha Belash with an energetic performance to ‘Business of Love’ by Domino.
Before heading onstage Ruffo told the excited crowd, “I’m really glad to be back performing. I just want to dance again.”
“Great news, the tumour in the right frontal lobe and the brain stem is all stable, everything is great,” he said, explaining his current condition.
The actor also spoke of an successful operation he had straight after his initial diagnosis in 2017.
“They said there’s a 20 per cent chance I might die from the operation, but if I didn’t have the operation there was a 100 per cent chance I’d die.
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“So, it’s not really much of a choice. I did have to have it.”
Ruffo went on to tell the audience that he’d be coming back to perform on an upcoming celebrity season of DWTS.
“I’m lucky enough to have been invited back as a special guest on Dancing with the Stars: All-Stars,” he said.
The former Home and Away actor also took to Instagram to share his excitement over the performance.
“That was so much fun & much harder than i remember. Thanks for having me on as a guest performer @dancingau & thanks to my dance partner @mbelash for being so patient with me. This years cast smashed it, so much talent!!” He wrote alongside a collage of videos and photos showing him preparing for the performance.
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Ruffo was first diagnosed with the devastating disease in November 2017. Appearing on 7NEWS Spotlight in June of this year, the actor and singer emotionally recalled receiving the diagnosis. Ruffo revealed that he was taken to the emergency room after suffering from chronic headaches.
“They told me I have brain cancer. And it was like, wow, my whole world just got flipped upside down,” he said.
“The day that it truly sunk in was maybe, I don’t know, three or four weeks into radiotherapy.
“I was at home one day, and I was watching television, and I just went to just scratch my hair, and I had a whole clump of hair in my hand, and I just broke down and I cried and cried and cried.
“And I went and sat in the shower and I just ripped all my hair out and I cried so much, and it was the worst day of my life. It was horrible.”
After rounds of chemotherapy, Ruffo officially went into remission in 2019, but the brain cancer returned in 2020.
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