By the time many people came to know Amanda Kloots, she had already lived several creative lives.
At 21, she earned a spot as a Radio City Rockette after competing against more than a thousand other dancers. Years later, she stepped away from the stage and built a fitness business of her own.
The chapter many people know her for, losing her husband, Nick Cordero, in 2020, was not where her story began. It was part of a much longer journey shaped by ambition, reinvention, resilience, and the difficult work of starting over. That larger story is what makes her role as the face of an Ethos life insurance campaign feel less like a celebrity partnership and more like a message rooted in real life.
The Career She Built Before the World Knew Her Name
Kloots grew up in Canton, Ohio, before moving to New York City to pursue a career in dance. For nearly 16 years, she built that career the way many performers do, one audition, role, and opportunity at a time.
She appeared in Broadway productions including Good Vibrations, Young Frankenstein, Follies, and later Bullets Over Broadway, where she met Nick Cordero. She also earned smaller film and television credits, including dance work in Ted 2 and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, along with later cameos on The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful.
It was a real career, but it was not always a predictable one. Performing can be deeply rewarding, but auditions, callbacks, and short-term roles do not always offer steady income. By her early thirties, Kloots was ready for more control over her work and her financial future.
How a Jump Rope Became a Business
That search eventually led Kloots to something simple: a jump rope. In 2016, she created a workout method that blended dance cardio with rope training and turned it into AK! Fitness, her own fitness brand.
What started as a class grew into a broader business, with studio sessions, a prenatal series during her pregnancy with her son Elvis, and eventually an app. When the pandemic closed in-person studios in 2020, Kloots moved the business online within weeks so her community could keep training from home.
It was a quick, resourceful pivot at a time when many fitness businesses were trying to figure out how to survive. For Kloots, though, it happened during an unimaginably difficult period. Those same months were also when her husband was fighting for his life in a Los Angeles hospital.
What Came After the Hospital
Cordero died on July 5, 2020, after spending 95 days in the hospital with COVID-19. Much has been said about the illness and the public grief that followed, but less is said about what came next financially.
Kloots has shared that the ventilator helping him breathe cost about $3,000 a day by itself. That was only one part of his care. Around 20 other machines were also supporting his body, and the full medical bill did not arrive until nearly a year and a half later.
She has also spoken openly about the fact that she and Cordero had never planned for the possibility that one of them might die young. They were in their forties. They were healthy. They had just bought their first home. Like many families, they did not think they needed that kind of plan because nothing in their lives made it feel urgent.
Why Her Ethos Campaign Feels Personal
That part of Kloots’ story is what makes her connection to a life insurance brand feel natural. It is also not the first time she has spoken about it publicly.
Before Ethos built a TV campaign around her story, Kloots had already described the financial shock that followed Cordero’s hospitalization. She talked about the cost of the ventilator, the medical bill that arrived long after his death, and the fact that she and Cordero had never made a plan for a moment like that.
What is different now is the format and the purpose behind it. Ethos gives Kloots’ story a more public platform, but the message itself is not new. Dave Brown, VP of Creative and Brand at Ethos, has said the team approached the spot with care, aiming to tell her story honestly rather than turn it into a polished celebrity endorsement.
The message she shares on camera, that everyone thinks they are invincible until they are not, does not feel like a line written for an ad. It feels like something she had already come to understand through her own life, long before anyone asked her to say it on camera.
The Reason She Keeps Returning to This Message
There is something important in the fact that Kloots keeps coming back to this message. People do not usually revisit one of the hardest financial memories of their lives unless they believe it could help someone else avoid the same burden.
Her point has never been that life insurance would have saved her husband or taken away the grief of losing him. It is more specific than that. Having a plan in place would have spared her one more fight at a time when she was already carrying more than anyone should have to.
That is a very different message from saying insurance fixes loss. It does not. But it can help protect a family from being left with financial questions in the middle of everything else.
In the years since, Kloots has continued building a wide-ranging career. She has written a memoir, competed on Dancing with the Stars, joined a daytime talk show, launched a supplements line, and wrote and starred in a holiday film.
None of that changes what happened in the hospital. But it does show something about the way she has chosen to move forward. Given a story this heavy, she kept working, kept speaking, and kept telling the truth about what she wishes she had known sooner.