Harry Shum Jr.’s $997K Home: The Hollywood Star Who Never Traded Up

Cue the music, lace up those dancing shoes, and meet the stars stepping into the ballroom. The season 35 celebrity cast of Dancing with the Stars was unveiled live Wednesday on Good Morning America. And the lineup includes a chef, social media stars, athletes, reality stars, television and film actors, and more. One name arrived with an asterisk already attached, Harry Shum Jr. The Glee and Grey's anatomy actor who danced behind Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Mariah Carey before he ever said a word on camera has been paired with two-time champion Jenna Johnson. Within hours, fans were already arguing that a man who danced professionally for a living and played a literal dancing football player on television for six seasons had no business in a fair competition. Shum has spent the days since gently pushing back on that assumption. Today, we are talking about Harry Shum Jr. The Costa Rican-born, Chinese-American actor who built two separate careers, one behind the camera as a professional dancer, and one in front of it as a television and film star. And we are going inside the Hollywood Hills home he has shared with his wife, actress Shelby Rabara, since 2014. We are covering the journey from backup dancer to Glee's Mike Chang, to Shadowhunters' Magnus Bane, to a supporting role in the Oscar-sweeping Everything Everywhere All at Once, the marriage that began with a shared cry at a Jennifer Hudson movie, and the modest, unshowy house that two decades of steady, multi-hyphenate success never actually convinced him to trade up from. This is Harry Shum Jr., told through the home he chose and the career that finally brought him, fairly or not, into the Dancing with the Stars ballroom. Harry Shum Jr. was born on April 28, 1982, in Limon, Costa Rica, to a family of Chinese descent. He did not set out to be a dancer. His early interests, by his own account, ran toward theater and sports and dance only entered the picture when he tried out for his high school dance team almost on a whim. By his late teens and early twenties, Shum was working as a professional backup dancer, touring and performing behind some of the biggest names in pop music, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Missy Elliott, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, and Mariah Carey among them. A resume built on the discipline of hitting a mark on stage in front of thousands of people, night after night, with no room for error. That dance career led directly into film, first through the Step Up franchise, and then into the role that made him a household name. In 2009, Shum was cast as Mike Chang on Fox's Glee, a role built specifically around his dance ability. A football player with serious moves, embedded inside a musical comedy drama that ran for six seasons and turned its entire ensemble cast into stars. He was nominated for four Screen Actors Guild Awards for his work on the show and won once for the ensemble. From there, he moved into Magnus Bane on Freeform's Shadowhunters, a role that ran from 2016 to 2019 and earned him the E! People's Choice Award for Male TV Star of 2018, recognition that reflected a fan base built specifically around his performance as one of television's most prominent bisexual characters. His film career expanded in parallel. He appeared in the ensemble of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018, one of the first major Hollywood studio films built around an all-Asian cast, and then, in 2022, took a supporting role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the A24 film that went on to sweep seven Academy Awards. Since 2022, he has held a recurring role as Dr. Benson Blue Kwan on ABC's Grey's Anatomy, giving him a rare kind of career stability across two decades of entertainment industry turnover. Along the way, he co-produced and starred in The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, a digital dance series that folded his original professional identity back into his acting career, and in 2024, he co-authored a children's picture book, Marty Dares to Dance with His Wife. That wife is Shelby Rabara, an actress and dancer best known as the voice of Peridot in Steven Universe, and, more recently, as the voice of Snappy in Toy Story 5. The two met in 2007 and began dating shortly after, with Rabara herself a former Los Angeles Lakers Laker girl before she moved into acting, reportedly encouraging Shum to audition for Glee in the first place. Shum has described their first real date as a trip to see Dreamgirls in theaters, the two of them crying together at Jennifer Hudson's performance and talking about it long afterward. They became engaged in October 2013 in Hawaii and married on November 22, 2015 in Costa Rica, surrounded by a handful of Shum's former Glee castmates. Their daughter, Zia, was born in March 2019, and the family has kept her almost entirely out of public view since. Now, let's go inside the home where that family actually lives. In February 2014, Shum purchased a house in the Hollywood Knolls section of the Hollywood Hills for $997,000, reportedly outbidding other buyers by nearly $60,000 over the asking price. The house itself, built in 1937, is a two-story, 1,821-square-foot single-family home with three bedrooms and two-and-a-half bathrooms, a scale that would strike most people as a comfortable family house rather than a celebrity showpiece, which is precisely the point. The interior retains its original architectural character, high ceilings, hardwood floors, French doors and windows, and detailed period molding original to the 1930s construction. Two guest suites face the street at the front of the house, while the primary suite sits at the rear, set back for privacy. The layout includes a separate living room, a dining area, a den, a gaming room, and an outdoor dining patio suited to a couple who built their careers on discipline rather than spectacle. More than a decade after that purchase, with his net worth now estimated well into the eight figures on the strength of a Glee salary, a Shadowhunters lead role, an Academy Award-winning film credit, and a continuing Grey's Anatomy paycheck, Shum has never traded up. The same Hollywood Knolls house that a working television actor could afford in 2014 remains, by every public account, the home where he, Rabara, and Zia still live. It is a real estate story built on something other than square footage, a family that found a house it actually liked and simply stayed. From a kid in Limon, Costa Rica, discovering dance almost by accident in high school, to a backup dancer behind Beyonce and Mariah Carey, to Mike Chang, to Magnus Bain, to an Academy Award-winning ensemble, to a modest 1937 house in the Hollywood Hills, he has never once felt the need to leave. To a Dancing with the Stars season 35 pairing with Jenna Johnson that has already stirred more debate than almost any other casting this season, Harry Shum Jr's story is, in its own way, a case study in staying exactly who you already were. So here's the question, does a lifetime of professional dance experience make Harry Shum Jr the one to beat this season? Or does acting like a football player who can dance not actually prepare you for the real thing? Drop your answer in the comments below.