Miley Cyrus’s entire life has been shaped by fame. Born at the height of her father Billy Ray Cyrus’s celebrity, she spent her childhood at his sold-out country concerts. At 13, she became a star herself — and an important part of the Disney machine — as the titular lead in “Hannah Montana,” playing a regular girl by day and a pop star by night and becoming a cultural touchstone for millennial kids.
By the time Cyrus left the show, she already had dozens of Billboard Hot 100 hits, but industry and tastemaker respect was harder to come by. As with many former female child stars, her transition to adulthood in the public eye was marked by controversy (twerking with Robin Thicke at the 2013 Video Music Awards) and judgment (the Parents Television Council condemned the performance), which she looks back on today with some bitterness at how she was treated.
Now 33, Cyrus is one of pop’s reigning female queens, a status cemented by her first Grammy win for her 2023 megahit “Flowers.” Her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” has just been released, and she says it’s her attempt to reimagine what “beautiful” means — her beloved grandmother’s death, for instance, or the emotion of rage, which she told me is beautiful because “it lets you know you’re alive.” We also spoke at length about her close relationship with her mother, Tish Cyrus-Purcell, her repaired relationship with her father and how she has learned to protect herself in a world that is still fascinated by everything she does. But we started by talking about the first time I interviewed her, when her candor and openness quite honestly freaked me out.
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You know, I’ve interviewed you before. You look really familiar to me.
No, we never saw each other because I was at NPR. The voice!
I was a new host back then. I hadn’t done a lot of celebrity interviews, and you came on and said: “Ask me anything. Anything at all.” And I had no idea what to do with that. I just froze and thought, I don’t know what to ask Miley Cyrus if she’s saying, “Ask me anything.” Would you say something like that now? I think I would say something like that now, but maybe paying a little closer attention. But yeah, you can ask me anything. I’ve learned that I’m in control. The worst that happens is I just leave the room — say, “I’ll be right back,” and then don’t come back.
I’d love for you to explain what that means for you now — being in control. It’s animalistic. It’s like everything will change the moment that anyone or any animal is unsafe. We all have our different tells. Mine is all in the throat, which makes so much sense. It’s where I feel everything. I can feel a tightness or a shortness of breath when I feel that I’m not completely safe. And I’ve given myself a mantra: Don’t run. I don’t want to leave situations that make me uncomfortable, because that’s what life is. We gotta be comfortable being uncomfortable. But also, I’m the mother to myself. I mother me.
I’ve never heard that phrase. My mom no longer travels with me, because I’m 33 years old, and it was getting ridiculous. I never want to detach from my mom, because we’re so close. I’ll get tears in my eyes even talking about her. But if nature plays its course in the way that it does, I will be an individual without my mom at some point, and that used to completely paralyze me. So I guess the reason I said “I mother me” is because I don’t have my mom with me the way that I used to. And now I just go, “What was it about her that made everything better?” It was safety, because I knew any situation that I didn’t feel safe in, my mom would get me out of it or make it better. And so now I just imagine what soothed me about her, and then I do it for myself.
Last year, you won your first Grammy for your song “Flowers,” and you exuded so much joy at that moment. I’m wondering why winning meant so much. I think I never admitted to myself how much it hurt to not be recognized for my work. I’ve hidden behind, “It didn’t matter,” so when I finally did get recognized, it was an extra layer of that bandage over something that I didn’t even know really hurt me.
Why do you think it took so long? I think there’s a couple things. Starting from being on Disney, you already have something that you have to overcome. I’ve never understood needing to overcome Disney or being Hannah Montana because Hannah Montana was a singer. I was never nominated for best new artist, which was totally cool with me, but at one point I just think I kind of was the best new artist — and if it wasn’t the best, it was just so impactful to a certain generation that there should be some sort of recognition for that. So I think with the Grammys, it was overcoming Disney, overcoming the character. And then when I left the character behind, like all the way behind, I went so many steps ahead really fast, and I don’t think that everyone could keep up.
I’m really interested in the idea of having to overcome your “Hannah Montana” days to be considered a real artist. There were other Disney artists that got nominated in that category. The Jonas Brothers, but they didn’t have a character to shed. I remember being brokenhearted because the Jonas Brothers got asked to perform with Stevie Wonder, and I never got an opportunity like that as a young girl, when my show had been on air for years and I had had everyone on that show — Dolly Parton, Vicki Lawrence, who taught me so many amazing things. It actually was the greatest blessing, though, that those awards never happened, because I was recognized all the time by millions of people that were really — their identities were being formed by me. There’s a part of them that’s a little part of me. So my reward is that people loved me, and that felt good. But every year, never having my name called, and I was working so hard. I’m not saying I am owed it or I deserve it, but it just felt like, “What am I not doing?”
I want to talk about the new album, “Something Beautiful.” The lead single is called “End of the World,” and you’ve talked about how it’s a song you wrote for your mom in a hard moment. Can you tell me about writing it? Yeah. That was completely ridiculous. She went on a vacation to Italy without me for one week, and it felt like the end of the world to both of us.
That’s what the song’s about? That’s what it’s about. I had never had my mom leave the country without me before. I’m too old to feel that way, but that’s how I felt. And my mom called me and said: “I don’t know why, but I want to cry today. I’m looking out my window, and there’s nothing out there for me, because you’re back home.” The first lyric is, “Today you woke up and you told me that you wanted to cry,” and that was my mom.
You sang the song at the Chateau Marmont and got really emotional. What was going on there? My mom was right in the front row, and there’s a part — it does it to me now — that says, “You’ve been thinking about the future like it’s already yours.” To me that was a lyric about not only mortality but just that every day isn’t promised to us, so worrying about the future that may never come is pointless, but then me thinking about a future without her just breaks my heart. That lyric gets me every time.
I’m curious about little Miley. When did you realize that you could really sing? Not just sing-sing, but sing. Even more than that, people used to just pay attention to me in weird ways that I noticed. Not everyone was being looked at or treated the way that I was. My mom was a total shopaholic when I was a kid. She would take me to the mall, which is the worst place for a kid with a bad attention span, and my favorite thing to do would be to go in front of stores and pretend I was a mannequin. I would hold it for so long. I would not budge. And I would get crowds of people around me staring because I was just milking it so hard. And I think they were like, “How long is this little girl going to keep up the bit?” And I would just do the bit. So I definitely noticed that there was something magnetic between me and other people, and I don’t say they were magnetized to me. We were magnetized to each other. But then with the singing, I would sing onstage, and I didn’t know if people were cheering because I was little and it was cute for me to come out and do Elvis songs. I never really thought, like, Oh, I can really sing. I just knew that people were reacting, and that’s what I was going off of. I was watching people light up and going: “That’s what I want. I want you to react to me.”
I heard you mention briefly in a recent interview with David Letterman that you were bullied in middle school, before you left for Hollywood and “Hannah Montana.” I’m the mother of a 12-year-old girl. Ouch. I feel for her.
Yeah, middle school is terrible. What did you take away from that period of your life? A lot of what did it for me in middle school was the attention that I had because of my dad and people putting on to me that I thought that I was special. I don’t think what hurt them was that I was special, but that it made them feel not special. Also, as outgoing as I was, middle school was a shy time for me. I shut down at that time because bullying takes so much from you. You don’t want attention. I wanted to be under the radar. I just wasn’t the most popular girl in school.
So you end up going to Hollywood, and you do “Hannah Montana.” And it’s interesting that we’ve been talking about getting over Disney because I had another former Disney star who’s now an actor, Jenna Ortega, tell me that she can always tell in a room who is the child actor. That there’s a certain noticeable precociousness — that people treat you as if you are an adult and that it kind of warps you. Does that resonate? I was literally still thinking about middle school. I’m really hoping in the comments of this interview, someone’s like: “Miley’s lying! She was really popular in school!” And I’m going to be like, “Oh, my God, I was popular.” Maybe I was? [laughs] I feel like I wasn’t. But about child acting, I don’t know how Jenna Ortega feels about it. I’ve never gotten to speak to her. I would totally love to. I think people that grew up in the same position — it would be really sick to do a round table.
You should all be in a group chat. Totally. Ariana says there should be therapy for child actors, and I totally agree. There should be a weekly check-in. I’ve been doing very consistent therapy since I was 17 or 18 years old, so I think I’ve cleared up a lot of the feelings that I had about being a child star, and now I don’t notice it so much because I don’t notice it in me. I guess the only thing I notice is when people are working too hard. I met Sabrina Carpenter a couple of times, and every time I see her I have the urge to ask her if she’s OK. I’ll see she’s performing in Ireland, and then the next day she’s doing a show in Kansas. And I’m like, “I don’t know how that could be physically OK,” because I was in that situation. I know what it feels like to fry yourself, and I don’t want anyone else to get fried. But I like all the new girls. I think they’re all unique and are very found. That’s what I like to see. I like people that have found themselves, because I don’t think I had myself totally figured out yet.
A lot of young stars have had to find themselves in the limelight, and you had a similar journey. There was a lot of scrutiny. When you look back at that period, 2013, when you were onstage with Robin Thicke and getting a lot of criticism for twerking at the V.M.A.s — All you have to say is “2013,” and I know where we’re going.
Yeah. You were shedding your Disney persona and becoming an adult in the public eye. When you look back at that period, what do you see? I see adults not acting like it. I would never look at someone that’s 18, 19, 20, 21 years old and judge them as an adult, because they’re not yet. At one point, there was even a petition. It was like “Millions of Moms Against Miley” or something.
Sorry I’m laughing. Did you sign the petition? Is that what made you laugh?
Oh, my god. I’m just messing with you. But isn’t that crazy, this petition? In 2013, maybe that performance felt really shocking, but when you watch it back, it really wasn’t that wild. I was dressed as a teddy bear.
In the same vein, you’ve said that you’ll never be able to live down the image of you swinging naked on a wrecking ball, which you did in the music video for the song. I don’t need to live it down.
Sinead O’Connor wrote an open letter to you after the video was released. She wrote: “The music business doesn’t give a [expletive] about you, or any of us. They will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think it’s what you wanted.” That feels like her experience being reflected on to me, but that’s not my experience. My experience was not that the music industry didn’t care about me.
That’s what I was wondering. Looking back, do those words have a different resonance now? No, I still don’t feel that way. But I also came from a very different upbringing, where I’ve known fame since the moment that I was born, so I was really well prepared. It’s hard to train yourself to know what to expect, everything that fame can bring, but I already had the handbook, because they did the same thing to my dad, and to Dolly, to everyone around me. You know what I think it is? I understand the business I’m in. I’m in the record business. When I sign a contract, they’re buying records that they wish to sell, so I understand that I am setting myself up to become merchandise. I’ve committed to them that I want to not only bring success for myself but also to them. So I understand the music industry. At one point in my life, I look forward to just being an artist, untied, untethered. At some point I’ll get to do that.
You’ve talked about how close you are with your mom. Your grandmother was the head of your fan club. I don’t know the story, though, about how Dolly Parton became your godmother. It was actually because of “Hannah Montana.” She played my aunt on the show, but I’ve known her since I was a little girl because my dad did music with her when I was just a baby. I hadn’t seen her since I was very young, and we got really tight during the “Hannah Montana” time. I think she looked at a little girl in a blond wig and was like, “I see you.” It was divine and kismet. We’re not blood, but we are family, truly. We chose each other. She walked in, and she had on a pink robe and smelled like baby powder, the hair, the wig, the whole thing, and everyone was in awe of her, and I remember thinking that I didn’t feel that. Because when you see her at first, it’s just so incredible that you’re kind of taken aback by how much power she holds. But instead of seeing myself retract in awe of her, I just felt myself going forward and feeling really safe. And it also felt like, “I can do this for the rest of my life and be happy, because she is so happy and has so much joy.” You see the celebrities that don’t have joy in their life. She’s someone who obviously had a superprivate relationship and a private life, and it was just something I always admired. More than the way that she looks or the way that she performs, I admired her staying true to herself and being at home with her husband, Carl, who she just lost, and having a real life and having a lot of love in it.
I do wonder, at this point, what it’s like for you to be part of this famous family. In the past few years, your mom remarried, and that caused some rifts. Your dad has a new relationship with Elizabeth Hurley. And all this stuff gets picked apart endlessly in the media, on social media. It must be complicated. The thing I like about the new way that the world works is that everything is so fast. In the ’90s, when something happened in a tabloid, remember how it would happen for a year? Now it’s just gone. Something may seem really important for a couple of hours, but then there’s a meme that goes viral, someone scats at Walmart, and that becomes the next thing. Anything that’s happening in the public, it can be embarrassing for the person that’s experiencing it, not so much for me. I just try to be more compassionate to my parents, because I hate that for them. And I mostly hate it for my siblings, because they didn’t choose that kind of highlight on themselves. But for me, I’ve gotten so used to it that I’m like, “If this is the symptom — that sometimes we deal with these embarrassing or difficult public opinions — then that’s something I’m willing to take to have the life that we have.”
Are you still estranged from your dad? No. I think timing is everything. As I’ve gotten older, I’m respecting my parents as individuals instead of as parents — because my mom’s really loved my dad for her whole life, and I think being married to someone in the music industry and not being a part of it is obviously really hard. And so I think I took on some of my mom’s hurt as my own because it hurt her more than it hurt me as an adult, and so I owned a lot of her pain. But now that my mom is so in love with my stepdad, who I completely adore, and now that my dad, I see him finding happiness, too — I can love them both as individuals instead of as a parental pairing. I’m being an adult about it. At first it’s hard, because the little kid in you reacts before the adult in you can go, “Yes, that’s your dad, but that’s just another person that deserves to be in his bliss and to be happy.” My child self has caught up.
You’ve talked some about therapy, and you’ve discussed doing eye movement desensitization and reprocessing [E.M.D.R.], which I’ve also done. Love it. Saved my life.
What did it do for you? Because this is a very specific type of therapy that really is to do with trauma. The tag on my tea says, “Take a moment just for you,” so I gotta answer this question but it’s for me. The first thing that happened was I was guided to seat myself on a train. Did you do it this way, where you watch the train pass you by? It’s so weird, because it’s like watching a movie in your mind, but it’s different than dreaming. You’re kind of more in yourself but still in another place of consciousness that’s hard to describe unless you’ve been in that hypnotic state. I see myself sit down on the train, and he says: “Just watch your life like a movie. Watch it pass you by through the windows.” And I see all these times, just frames of these moments like a film, and he goes, “What’s the feeling of anxiety that comes up for you when you’re performing?” And I never even thought about it before, but in my hypnotic place, I said, “I just want them to love me so bad.” And he said, “When was the first time you felt that way?” Then suddenly the train stopped moving forward, and it started going backward, and I saw myself — it sounds so trippy, but this is medical. This is real.
It is real. I’ve done it. It’s real. I saw myself in the womb of my biological grandmother, because my mom was adopted, and I heard my mom’s biological parents talking about putting her up for adoption. I felt myself being inside of her womb as my mother, hearing them speaking about giving her away, and my mom thinking: I just want them to want me. I want them to love me so bad. And then he says, “When’s the next time you felt that way?” Fast-forward, I see my mom being handed to my grandmother, who adopted her, who’s my everything. Loretta. That’s my Mammie. So handing to her — and then just like that, I see myself being handed to my grandmother too as a baby. My mom had a very intense, very dangerous pregnancy with me, so I wasn’t actually handed to my mom. I was handed to my grandma. So I saw myself being handed to the same woman that my mom was handed to, and I felt our unison right away. And he’s like, “Keep going.” I found myself on a mountaintop in a place that I had experienced a lot of trauma, in the snow in Montana. It was a really intense moment of being surrounded by nature. It really puts you in your place. And I saw myself there as a little girl in a coat that I used to love, this little red coat with a red beret, and I saw all these people that had brought me so much peace and love all of a sudden show up. My dog that died a couple years ago, my grandma, my mom — ugh, it’ll get me — my boyfriend that I have now, and they all grabbed me by the hands, and we started playing Ring Around the Rosie, and I came out of it and I’ve never had stage fright again.
Wow. I did more sessions, because there was so much more under that. But I think the thing that I had — the “I want them to love me so bad” — it wasn’t mine, it was my mom’s. It pained me for her to carry it, so I’ve been carrying it for her. I do that sometimes. That’s something I’m working on.
It makes me wonder if you ever felt the same about your dad, because you’ve talked before about his rough childhood, about his own upbringing, his own struggles. Definitely. I have a lot of grace for him. He grew up in severe poverty, not always having indoor bathrooms. He had rarely, if at all, gone to the dentist by the time he met my mom. No doctor’s appointments. He was raised in a supersmall town in Kentucky. I spent some of my life in Nashville, but most of it was in L.A., in a safe neighborhood, and I just can’t even compare our upbringings in any way, shape or form. So I definitely have a really compassionate place in my heart for my dad’s upbringing that I can’t quite understand.
You worked so much with your dad, and then you surpassed him in success. And I wondered if you ever thought he felt competitive or eclipsed by that? That has added a level of complexity within my family, for sure. I think it would be hard for anybody with a dream to see somebody else achieving theirs in a way that you see for yourself. But I do think love conquered all. He can still find the pride in me. But it would be delusional for any of us to think that that doesn’t add a level of complication to our already complicated dynamic.
Have you felt guilty about it? I got rid of my guilt and shame in E.M.D.R. That was a big part of that. At times in my life, guilt and shame were a driver for me. I had a hard time accepting that I could suffer, because of how blessed I am. I don’t think that’s actually played too much of a part between me and my dad, though, because I have to have the faith that, like any dad, he would want this for me.
Something we didn’t talk about is your sobriety. You’ve talked about how you needed to get sober to protect your vocal cords. I’m a fellow sober person. Love it.
Yeah. It’s been about two and a half years. I know there was discussion in your family about your dad’s sobriety. Did you ever talk to him about your own journey and if it could help him? I think he has a harder time enjoying being sober. I kind of enjoy it. I think my dad is somebody that’s like, “That would be real nice right now.” He calls it a good bad habit. Things that make you feel good, but you know they’re bad. So I think for him, I grew up in a different generation. My dad grew up between the ’60s and the ’80s. It wasn’t normal for you to have your psychiatrist on speed dial. So I think my dad just really didn’t have the support.
So you never talk to him about it? We don’t avoid it, but it’s not really something that’s our table talk. Me and my dad like to talk about music and movies. It’s not something that’s ever been our focus, but it probably should be. We probably should talk about that at some point.
You know, we talked about your experience with E.M.D.R., and you were basically describing how you work through intergenerational trauma in your sessions. And it did make me wonder, given all that, if being a parent is something you’re interested in. It’s not something I’m focused on. For being such an opinionated, sure person, this is an element in my life that I’ve never been superattached to a yes or no answer. I was talking to my stepdad, and he said, “Why are you the only celebrity without a makeup line?” And I said, “’Cause I’m not passionate about it.” And he said, “That’s the right answer.” I feel that way about motherhood. It’s just never been something that I’ve been overly passionate about. It’s a lot of responsibility and devotion and energy, and if you’re not passionate about that, I don’t know how you do sleepless nights and 18 years of what my mom dealt with. And when I say 18 years, I mean 33, ’cause I’m still a baby. So I’ve never felt the burn, you know? And I think for me, the burn is everything.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Video by Tre Cassetta and Leslye Davis
Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a series focused on interviewing the world’s most fascinating people.
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