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Alyson Stoner Returns After 17 Years

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Sixteen years after her first Ellen appearance, Alyson Stoner walked back onto that stage as the “Work It” kid all grown up.

The September 9, 2019 season premiere of The Ellen DeGeneres Show brought back a face viewers hadn’t seen on that couch since Season 1. Alyson Stoner, the pigtailed dancer who became a household name in Missy Elliott’s 2002 video for “Work It,” sat down with Ellen DeGeneres for the first time since 2003, when Stoner was a 10-year-old performer dancing alongside the host during the show’s inaugural year. The reunion came just two weeks after Stoner’s surprise return to the spotlight at the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards.

• Stoner, now 26, reunited with Missy Elliott on the VMA stage on August 26, 2019, the night Elliott received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.
• Stoner revealed that Elliott’s choreographer, Hi-Hat, reached out only one day before the show to invite them into the performance, leaving no time for formal rehearsal.
• The Ellen interview marked Stoner’s first appearance on the show since her 2003 guest spot during Ellen’s Season 1, sixteen years earlier.

A Reunion Sixteen Years in the Making

Stoner’s original visit to Ellen came during the show’s first season in 2003, at the height of the “Work It” video’s popularity, when Stoner was still a child performer known for that unmistakable yellow-and-black tracksuit dance break. Sitting down with DeGeneres again in 2019, Stoner reminisced about that early appearance and what it felt like to dance with Ellen on national television as a 10-year-old. The gap between the two visits, spanning nearly the entirety of Stoner’s public career, gave the segment the feel of a genuine full-circle moment rather than a routine celebrity drop-in.

The VMA Stage, One Day’s Notice

The reason Stoner was booked for the premiere traces directly back to August 26, when Missy Elliott accepted the Video Vanguard Award at the VMAs and brought Stoner out during the performance in a bright yellow tracksuit that nodded straight back to the original video. Stoner told Ellen the invitation came together fast, with Hi-Hat contacting them just one day ahead of the show to fold them into the choreography with essentially no rehearsal time. That detail, which Stoner had also shared on social media, became the centerpiece of the conversation.

Hi-Hat reached out only one day before the show, inviting Stoner into the performance without time for formal rehearsal.

Life After “Work It”

Beyond the VMA story, Stoner used the segment to talk about a deliberate downsizing of their personal life in recent years, a shift DeGeneres pressed them on during the interview. Rather than framing the conversation strictly around a comeback, Stoner treated the VMA cameo and the Ellen visit as one piece of a broader, more scaled-back approach to fame after growing up inside it. It’s the kind of candid, career-reflection segment that has become a signature of DeGeneres’s premiere episodes, not unlike other celebrity conversations that have played out on Ellen’s stage over the years.

For longtime viewers, the segment also doubled as a reminder of how much of Ellen‘s early identity was built on exactly this kind of dance-and-talk format, a formula the show has leaned on since Season 1 and one that regularly resurfaces whenever details about DeGeneres’s day-to-day persona come up in the press.

Stoner didn’t announce a specific next project during the sit-down, but the pairing of the VMA cameo and the Season 17 premiere slot did what it was designed to do: put “Work It” back in the conversation seventeen years after it first aired, with Stoner controlling the retelling this time instead of watching it happen as a kid on set.