Jason Mraz wanted off ‘Dancing with the Stars’ — because he missed his cat

Jason Mraz came in second on Dancing with the Stars last year, but in a new podcast interview, he admits he wanted to be voted off much earlier — because he missed his cat so much.

Talking to Jesse Tyler Ferguson for his Dinner’s on Me podcast, Jason reveals that he started to panic when he realized he was doing so well on the show that he wasn’t in any danger of going home early. “Two or three weeks in, I realize I’m probably going to be here the whole time, and I’m terrified, and I have to cancel all my plans for the entire rest of the year, and I’m missing my cat terribly,” he said. “And I start telling my friends, ‘Stop voting for me!’”

“And I even told the producers, ‘I’m good. I can go home now, thank you so much for the honor,'” he added. “And they said, ‘We can’t do anything about you being here.’ So the only thing I could do was ask friends to vote for someone else.”

“So, having made it all the way to the very end, made it to the buzzer, I look back and laugh and think, ‘Well, maybe if I’d actually given a s***,'” he joked. “So, I would do it all over again if I could, and I would try really hard. Maybe they’ll have a Dancing with the Stars all-star season. I would go back.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Jason revealed that he didn’t come out as queer until 2018 because, he said, “In the ’90s, being gay was like [the] punchline of a joke. And I didn’t want to be the punchline of a joke.”