Trivia / Center Stage (2000)

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Cooper rides around almost everywhere on a motorcycle. Ethan Stiefel is also a passionate motorcyclist, having ridden across the country on a motorcycle.
  • Jody's parents tell her she "could always dance in college" and even recommends Indiana University for its dance program. Her actress, Amanda Schull, attended Indiana University as a ballet and journalism major for two years. She has also stated that her turnout and her natural foot shape were things she struggled with as a dancer, much like Jody.
• Cast the Expert: This film is loaded with professional dancers. Amanda Schull (Jody), Ethan Stiefel (Cooper), Sascha Radetsky (Charlie), and Julie Kent (Kathleen) were all professional ballet dancers — the latter three principal dancers with prominent companies in the American Ballet Theatre and the Dutch National Ballet — whose careers continued long after filming was over. Zoe Saldana (Eva) trained pre-professionally, while Ilia Kulik (Sergei) was an Olympic champion figure skater. Actual students from the School of American Ballet play the corps, as well as background students at the school.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Susan May Pratt, who plays Maureen, the best dancer in the school (though she secretly doesn't want to be), had no dance training at all. Pratt actually took a couple of weeks of classes before filming started, and her teacher even said she could really be something after a year of training, but it simply wasn't enough.
  • Although Jody has the Actor-Shared Background of going to Indiana University as a ballet major, unlike Jody, she was far more successful as a dancer and was among the only dancers in the main female cast working with a professional dancer while filming – she was in her apprentice season with San Francisco Ballet and joined full-time shortly after.
• Real-Life Relative: Ethan Stiefel's fellow ABT dancer and girlfriend at the time, Gillian Murphy — whom he married in 2015 — has a small cameo as the girl Ethan blows Jody off for.