Andy Richter Recalls Feeling ‘Touched’ When His Son, 25, Asked to Come Back Each Week to Watch Him on “DWTS” (Exclusive)

Andy Richter's son had a front row seat to his dad's run on Dancing with the Stars.

In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, the 59-year-old comedian sat down with PEOPLE to reflect on how the entire dance reality show experience impacted him. Richter, who made it to Week 9 this season, shares that he didn't originally think his older kids — Mercy, 20, and William, 25 — would be interested in watching him compete on the show. However, he says their reaction, especially his son's, "touched" him.

"Everybody came to the first show. And after that, my son, at the end of that show, said to me, 'Can I come back next week?' Which I was really touched by, and he was there every week pretty much," he recalls. "He was so supportive and told me how brave he thought I was for doing it. And it was really, really touching and really wonderful to me."

Richter shares his daughter and son with ex-wife Sarah Thyre. He is also a stepfather to 5-year-old Cornelia with wife Jennifer Herrera.

Less than two weeks after his elimination, Richter told PEOPLE exclusively that he was still recovering physically from his Dancing with the Stars run.

“Certainly my body is enjoying not dancing, just because I was really getting to the point where I was always having to ice my knees every hour,” he revealed. “We'd dance a while, and then I'd have to ice my knee, and there was a lot of pain and getting injections just to be able to keep going. So I'm healing. It's not even just that I'm sort of resting; I feel like my legs are healing now. It wasn't just exercise, it was borderline abuse that I was doing to myself.”

“As much as I do feel like my body's healing, I do kind of miss the physicality of it,” he added. “Going to the gym and doing the elliptical is not the same thing as rehearsing a new dance with Emma [Slater]. It's just not.”

When he was first approached to join the show in April 2025, Richter said he was reluctant to accept the offer. For years, he had been working out with a trainer and had been open about his weight struggles in the past, but he still “did not have a healthy attitude about exercise or about my own body or about my own fitness.”

“My initial reaction was, it was to say no,” he recalled. “And then two seconds later, I was like, ‘I have to do this.’ I mean, it's a good job. It's well-paying, and it's good exposure, but that honestly was secondary to me feeling like, no, this will be really good for me to have to do this fairly scary, daunting, physical thing. And I knew that that would be good for me because I was very much aware of the fact that I kind of was in a bit of a rut just in terms of my physicalness, my physicality, my body.”

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At the beginning, it was “very difficult” for the Three Questions podcast host, who noted “it was not a natural process” to learn the dances. Much to his surprise, however, he quickly fell in love with the sport.

“I really started to feel a sense of accomplishment in learning to do it,” Richter shared. “And [Slater] made me feel so good about doing it, and she made it so much fun.”

“I really started to enjoy it and started to feel transformed by it and started to like the exercise,” he continued. “There was just a lightness to me, I mean in attitude. I was able to sort of feel like, yeah, I'm going to do this. And it definitely was hard. It's long hours. It's four hours a day, seven days a week, minimum. I have bad knees and a bad hip, and so there's just plain old pain involved for me in doing it. But I really got into it and I really committed myself to it.”

Looking back to himself just a few months ago, Richter said he felt like “a different person” both physically and mentally. 

“There's a lot of stuff that I didn't think I could do anymore,” he confessed. “It's made what I think is physically possible; it's expanded that completely. And honestly, it's kind of made me younger. I'm younger now than when I started doing this.”

“I've seen it with people in my life that as they get older, they are these open people that are willing to try new things and do new things, and as they get older, that shuts down and they get more scared and they get more fearful and they stick to the tiny little island of what they know and what they feel comfortable with,” he explained. “I have for years seen that and gone, oh man, I don't want to do that. I think I was on my way there without really even admitting it to myself, and this ballroom dance competition has changed that for me.”

Richter's podcast The Three Questions with Andy Richter airs every Tuesday on the SiriusXM app and wherever you get your podcasts. He also hosts The Andy Richter Call-In Show, which airs Wednesdays on SiriusXM’s Conan O’Brien Radio (Ch. 104).