Vito Coppola Interview: Strictly Come Dancing Star Talks Embracing His Individuality

Given just how many professionals have come and gone through the doors of Strictly Come Dancing’s iconic ballroom over the last two decades, it’s never been more difficult for one to really break through as a stand-out star.

Still, in the last five years, Vito Coppola has managed to make his mark and emerge as a real fan-favourite among Strictly viewers. After just two seasons in the cast, Vito managed what some of the show’s longest-serving pros never achieved, by lifting the coveted Glitterball Trophy. In that time, he’s also made the live final on an additional two occasions, performed in some of the most popular Strictly routines in recent memory and is the current reigning Christmas champion, thanks to his work in last year’s festive special.

You can put his success and popularity down to a few factors. Yes, he’s proficient in all the usual hallmarks we associate with Strictly – the high-energy performances, the imaginative choreography, the low-cut shirts. But the secret ingredient for Vito, truly, is his personality.

The Italian star has become synonymous with his upbeat attitude, his apparent lack of filter and the way he’s never afraid to lean into his silly side – and this is exactly the Vito that greets us when we meet him just weeks before the new series of Strictly gets underway.

“Sometimes people ask me, ‘are you really like that?’” he tells HuffPost UK. “Well, I don’t know any other way to be. I’m very transparent, I’m very honest, I’m a very open book – what you see is what you get.”

As for whether the sunny version of his character we see on TV is ever hard to live up to, he insists: “If you are yourself, and you are true to yourself, it’s not difficult, because you’re being yourself, you don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not.

“So I am as I am, as you see me.”

“Actually sometimes, I even have to be a bit contained,” Vito admits. “I can be a bit, you know, very like an excited puppy. So, sometimes, I don’t know, maybe it can be a bit too much’.

“You know how here [in the UK], people say ‘hello’ with a five-feet distance? I do not respect the five-foot distance at all,” he jokes. “I come towards you and I hug you, and I jump on you and I lift you up.”

What’s interesting is how much the fully realised version of Vito that fans have grown to know and love is somewhat at odds with the dancer Strictly introduced back in July 2022.

He recalls: “When I first came here, to the UK, I had a few interviews. At the time, there were other Italians on the show, and people always said to me, ‘are you going to be the new Italian stallion?’. I was like, ‘nah, I am not an Italian stallion. I don’t want to be an Italian stallion. I am more like a pony. I want to be a pony!’.”

When it comes to representing Italy on the dance floor, he says he’d rather do that by bringing “the sun of the Amalfi Coast, where I come from”.

“If I can represent my personality, imagine the sun,” he enthuses. “I love smiles, I love high energy, you know? I’m not going to be too serious.”

For Vito, venturing into dance was always going to be an inevitability.

Born and raised in Eboli, Salerno, he grew up in a family of dancers.

“My auntie is a dance teacher, my uncle is a dance teacher, my grandparents loved to dance,” he explains, while his father was a competitive “acrobatic rock and roll dancer”.

“I’ve seen videos, and he used to flip these girls that he was dancing with very, very high,” he beams. “You know sometimes you see cheerleaders, they literally push them, and they throw them up in the air, they spin and they come back? It was like that, but a one-to-one couple partnership.”

By the age of six, he was already “always dancing, at home and around”.

“So, at some point, they said, ‘Do you want to do this properly?’,” he explains. “And I was like, ‘OK, why not?’.”

He quickly caught the dance bug, and before long, he was already competing, with ballroom and Latin having been his passion from those days… “I probably didn’t even know or understand or realise that I was actually competing – I was like six or seven,” he says. “But I loved it.

“From there, it just went more and more and more, and it became part of my daily life. Rehearsals, competitions at the weekend… and dance just became my entire life.”

While Vito’s family always encouraged his passion for dance, he admits that, growing up in Italy, it wasn’t always something that his peers understood.

“I’m not going to lie… of course, you know, in Italy, football is a big thing?” he notes.

“So, if you are a dancer, it’s like, ’of course, he cannot come to play with us, guys, because he has to go to dancing’. So, they used to make sort of double-meaning jokes of it.”

Fortunately, feeling left out was never something he particularly worried about.

“I have always been a very determined kid. I always know that when I want to do something, I am going for it, no matter what. So, I was not really that worried,” he insists. “I never said, ‘oh my god I should go and play football instead of dancing’. It was more like, ‘it’s fine, I just do what I like’.”

He adds: “It’s difficult sometimes to explain this, but I didn’t really need to go to play football with anyone, because I was so happy.”

Besides, he says, he was never lonely because he was always surrounded by family.

“You dance at your dad’s dance school, your mum’s there as well, your little brother’s there, your cousins are there too,” he remembers of this time.

“That’s why sometimes I didn’t have many friends in a certain way, besides my schoolmates, because I didn’t need it. We are a big, big family. My family were my friends.”

As his professional dance career has progressed into adulthood, Vito says this is something he’s discussed with many of his peers “especially with other male dancers”.

“I always encourage [people] to do what they feel is right for them,” he shares. “I say like, ‘you know in your heart if you’re doing something that brings you joy and happiness’.

“Sometimes I [meet] other dancers [who] did leave experience of dancing [feeling] differently [to me] – they felt a bit not part of a group or excluded.

“And I say, like, ‘listen, you are where you are today because you did choose yourself – instead of what you told your friends wanted to do or wanting to be just to be part of a group – don’t worry’.”

“It’s a bit like you say, stop trying to chase and catch the butterflies,” he adds. “If you grow your own beautiful garden, and the flowers will blossom, butterflies will come to you. And it has happened!”

Over the course of his competitive dancing career, Vito became an 11-time Latin dancing champion in his native Italy, as well as being a three-time world championship finalist, and winning the European Cup.

He then made the move to TV, serving as a pro on Italy’s Dancing With The Stars, which he won his first season of, at which point Strictly came calling.

By the time he joined the cast of one of Britain’s most-watched Saturday night shows, Vito’s dancing had already taken him around the world, but he never anticipated that he’d find himself 1,000 miles from home, performing for millions of people on live Saturday night TV.

“I would have never, ever imagined that I’d be living in the UK – and feeling so welcomed by people here in the UK,” he reveals. “If you would have asked me before, I would have said, ‘no, no, no, I’m going to stay in Italy, always’. Because, of course, I love my Italy.”

However, he acknowledges that something felt different when he first arrived in London.

“I’ve always been travelling around the world so much because of competitions, but I never felt I belonged anywhere specifically,” he explains. “So, in my mind, it was always like, ‘you travel, but you always come back home’. And in the UK, it’s been the very first time in my life that I went somewhere that was not Italy, and I felt I could actually settle here. I can actually belong here.”

Admittedly, he wasn’t always sure quite how he’d go down with the British public.

“Before coming to the UK, a part of me was a bit, ‘I don’t know what to expect, maybe people will not like me or find me too extra, too much, too full-on’,” he says. “Because I am!

“My family said to me, ‘just be yourself, and you will see that we love you, and because we love you, other people will love you’. So, I said, ‘OK, I come here without expectation, this is me’.”

“At the beginning, it was probably not the version of the classic Italian that they were used to,” he continues, but says that the UK embraced him with a “feeling of belonging” that he hadn’t been expecting.

“I like to look people in the eyes, always. I don’t kind of look in empty space, I like to always find energy from people and give people energy,” he says. “When I came to the UK, I remember, I was walking on Oxford Street, and when I was looking at people, don’t ask me why, they were just all smiling. They didn’t know me, I had just arrived, I was not even announced as a Strictly pro, so there was no way they could have [known who I was].”

Besides this “feeling of being so welcomed since the very beginning”, he credits “the people”, “the culture” and fans’ love of dance as being some of the factors that have led to him embracing the UK during his time on Strictly.

But, of course, anyone who’s lived in the UK for a prolonged period will tell you that people aren’t always the friendliest – and this is something Vito also has first-hand experience of.

“It depends,” he claims. “Of course, there are people who are a bit more reserved. In the building where I live, my neighbour, I keep knocking on the door, but they don’t open it. I cannot meet my neighbour for some reason! I can hear they are there inside, behind the door, and probably they see me from the little [peephole], but they don’t [answer]… so, I don’t know who my neighbours are!”

Even this won’t deter the eternal optimist, though.

“It’s fine, I don’t give up,” he states. “I’m going to bring them some food, and say, ‘listen, this is for you, this is my treat, I am your neighbour, I’m going to leave that in front of the door, and whenever, if you want, I am just one wall away’.”

Indeed, for Vito – a former Celebrity MasterChef champion – “dance and food” are the two pillars on which some of his fondest memories are built.

For his latest venture, it’s the latter that he’s leaning into, for a collaboration with a brand he says is so close to him he “never would have imagined” that it could one day come to fruition.

Vito has teamed up with the “irresistibly Italian” dessert brand Balconi for a campaign, having already been a lifelong fan of the tasty treats.

“I’ve been eating Balconi cakes with my brother since we were little,” he shares. “Every morning, we used to wake up, we had breakfast with a glass of milk, and Balconi cakes. And at bedtime, we used to have Balconi cakes as a little treat before going to sleep.”

Because of this, he says his brother – himself a former-competitive-dancer-turned-accountant – was “the first person I called when I had the possibility to do this collaboration”, which he says represents a “circle that goes completely perfectly in alignment”.

“Balconi has been part of our family – but they don’t know it – since we were little,” he notes. “We were eating so many Balconi cakes that my father, at some point, started to hide them in the house… and it became a kind of hide-and-seek game, that during the years. became a thing!

“Even today, when I am at home, before going to bed, I have my FaceTime with my brother, Jonathan, and we keep having our Balconi treats with our glass of milk.”

Of course, Vito will next be seen in the long-awaited 24th series of Strictly Come Dancing, which represents a year of change for the series, with several new arrivals to the ballroom – not least a trio of new hosts.

“I’ve been lucky because Strictly has been a family to me,” he says of the show. “They kept me in their bubble, and they always looked after me – which they do with every pro, but I can only speak for myself.

“I felt that I arrived here and I was already at home. And I don’t take for granted that feeling.”

Vito Coppola proudly teams up with the irresistibly Italian Balconi cake brand – available in all major retailers now (RRP from £1.75).

For more information, visit www.balconiuk.com or @balconi_uk