Leah Isadora Behn announced her next act the way her generation announces most things, with a single word and a portrait engineered to travel. The image, posted to Instagram this week, found the 21-year-old perched on a disco ball in a sleeveless ballgown the exact pale blue of a fairy tale, one caption doing the work of a press release: “SUPRISE!!!! denne høsten blir crazy.” This fall will be crazy. With that, Behn, granddaughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja and sixth in line to the Norwegian throne, confirmed she will compete on the coming season of Skal vi danse, the Nordic entry in the Dancing with the Stars franchise, which airs across Norway this autumn on TV 2.
The show is not a minor property. Running since 2006 and now entering its landmark run after a twentieth anniversary season that leaned hard on its own legend, Skal vi danse remains one of the country’s most durable Saturday-night rituals, a live ballroom contest decided by a panel of judges and the voting public in roughly equal measure. To enter it is to submit to a very particular kind of exposure, weeks of Latin and ballroom choreography performed without a net, the polish of a model’s portfolio traded for the visible effort of learning something difficult in real time. Behn will do it alongside Andreas Holst Hiim, a 20-year-old professional making his own debut on the series, who arrives with a shelf of Scandinavian competition titles and a caption of his own: “Let the show begin.”
For Behn, television is by now familiar terrain, though this represents a sharper turn toward the spotlight. Last year she appeared on the fifth season of Forræder, the Norwegian edition of The Traitors, where she played a Faithful and was eliminated before the finish, an early lesson in the way these formats reward composure under scrutiny. What she has built in the interim is more considered than reality fame usually allows. She founded Dorah, a vegan and cruelty-free makeup line, and turned a following of several hundred thousand across TikTok and Instagram into genuine industry footing. This year alone she opened for the Oslo label Murlong Cres in her runway debut, walked Copenhagen Fashion Week, and covered the July/August 2026 issue of Elle Norway, the kind of trifecta that signals a model being taken seriously rather than merely photographed.
That context matters, because Behn occupies an unusual position in the Norwegian firmament. She holds no formal title and performs no official royal duties, a distance from the palace that has, paradoxically, given her room to become a public figure entirely on her own terms. Her decision arrives inside a broader family recalibration; her mother, Princess Märtha Louise, married the American self-styled shaman Durek Verrett in 2024, a union that has kept the family at the edge of Norwegian public conversation. Verrett was among the first to respond to the announcement, resharing it to his own Instagram with a note calling her “angel” and telling her he was proud, while Märtha Louise added a lighter aside of her own. The endorsements read less like royal protocol than like an ordinary blended family cheering a daughter on.
Behn is the middle of three sisters born to the princess and the late author and artist Ari Behn, whose death in 2019 marked the family in ways that have shaped how the public reads its younger members. Her sisters have chosen quieter paths, one toward art, the other toward competitive showjumping. Leah has chosen visibility, and appears to have made peace with what that costs. To step onto the Skal vi danse floor is to be judged, in front of a nation, at something she has not yet mastered. That she is doing it anyway, in Cinderella blue, atop a disco ball, is perhaps the most fluent statement she has made yet about the kind of public life she intends to have.
