Miley Cyrus ‘didn’t make a dime’ from her Bangerz tour, blesses Sinéad O’Connor after falling out

If you were a kid in the 2000s, there’s a good chance you grew up with Miley Cyrus.

Since she burst onto the scene as Hannah Montana in 2006, Cyrus has been a fixture in pop culture. To mark the release of her new single Used To Be Young, Cyrus is looking back on her time in Hollywood in a candid TikTok series.

Here’s what we learnt.

Killer schedules Cyrus’ journey to becoming Hannah Montana began in in 2004, when she was just 12 years old.

Singing a Britney Spears song, she originally auditioned for Hannah’s friend Lilly — a part that would eventually go to Emily Osment.

The now-30-year-old gave her TikTok audience a candid look at what her schedule looked like when she was barely in her teens.

Here’s the example she gave:

5:30am: Hair and makeup in my H๏τel

7am: We get picked up

7:15am: I’m on the news

7:35am: Another live interview

8:15am: Another interview

9:30 – 11am: Meeting with editors

11am: Back to the H๏τel, interview with 5th graders

1-2:30pm: Lunch interview with dad

2:40pm: Life magazine pH๏τo shoot

3-5pm: Interview and pH๏τo shoot for the fathers day issue

6pm: Kids online interview

6:15pm: Another interview

“Then the next starts at 7am and ends at 7:30pm,” Cyrus says. “That was on a Saturday, and then back to work on Monday.”

Off-camera, her mother Tish Cyrus chimes in. “That was your life for the next four years,” she says.

‘That’ Vanity Fair pH๏τo

Cyrus’ journey from Disney tween to burgeoning woman was heavily covered in tabloids of the time. And it was all kickstarted with a risque Vanity Fair cover shoot with Annie Lebovitz.

The cover image showed 15-year-old Cyrus, seemingly ɴuᴅᴇ and wrapped in a bedsheet. The backlash from the public and Disney was so immense that both Cyrus and Leibovitz apologised (Cyrus would rescind this apology 10 years later).

In 2023, Cyrus remembers the pH๏τo shoot differently. “My little sister Noah, was sitting on Annie’s lap taking the pictures. My family was on set,” she says.

“This is the first time I wore red lipstick because Pati Dubroff who did my make up thought that would divide me from Hannah Montana.

“This image is a complete opposite of the bubblegum pop star that I had been. And that’s what was so upsetting.” “But really brilliant choices looking back from those people.”

On her relationship with Liam Hemsworth

For most of the videos, Cyrus sticks to her career and family but dedicates a little time to her ex-husband, Australian actor Liam Hemsworth.

The pair met while filming 2010’s The Last Song. “In 2008, I needed to do another feature film for Disney and I didn’t want it to be a part of Hannah Montana,” Cyrus says.

“We had gotten it down from 1000’s to the final three and Liam was part of that final three.”

Cyrus continues: “I think what was so beautiful about that film was it was watching two young people fall in love with each other which was happening in real time and real life.”

She decided on divorce moments before Glastonbury performance

The pair would date on-and-off over a period of 10 years, marrying in 2018 and finalising their divorce in early 2020. Cyrus says that her decision to split permanently from Hemsworth made her see trauma in a different light.

“Glastonbury [2019] was in June which is when the decision had been made that me and Liam’s commitment to me being married came from a place of love … but also from a place of trauma and trying to rebuild as quickly as we could,” Cyrus says.

“The show was the day that I decided that it was no longer going to work in my life to be in that relationship.”

Cyrus continues, “That was another moment where the work, the performance, the character came first and I guess that’s why it’s so important to me that that’s not the case, the human comes first.”

Cyrus blesses the late Sinéad O’Connor

Looking back 10 years later, Cyrus has a more nuanced view of the situation and where O’Connor was coming from.

But at 20 years old, she didn’t have that perspective.

“All that I saw was that another woman had told me that this idea was not my idea and even if I was convinced that it was it was just still men in powers idea of me and they made me believe it was my own idea,” Cyrus says.

“I had just been judged for so long and I was just exhausted, and I was finally in a position where I was making my own choices and to have that taken away from me deeply upset me.”

Cyrus concludes with a sign of respect towards the recently-deceased O’Connor. “Bless Sinéad O’Connor, in all seriousness,” she says.

‘Didn’t make a dime’ from the Bangerz tour As her post-Hannah Montana career progressed, as did Cyrus’ willingness to take risks with her sound and image.

In 2014, Cyrus set out on the Bangerz tour — performing 78 shows over five continents.

Cyrus briefly touches on her controversial MTV VMA’s performance of We Can’t Stop that introduced the wider world to the concept of twerking (“When you look back at it, you were mad at a fricken’ 20-year-old dressed as a teddy bear.”)

More time is allotted to the open letter Sinéad O’Connor published in response to the similarities between the music video for Wrecking Ball and O’Connor’s Nothing Compares to You.

O’Connor criticised Cyrus for appearing in the video in underwear, accusing her of being exploited and ‘pimped’ by men in the pop industry.

“When I put out Wrecking Ball I was expecting backlash and controversy but I don’t think I expected other women to turn on me, especially women who had been in my position before,” Cyrus says in retrospect.

And Cyrus says she “didn’t make a dime from it.” “A lot of ideas were so outlandish that people didn’t want to support making these pieces,” she says.

“I had big puppets, oversized beds, I came out of my face on a slide which was my tongue.” As Cyrus continued through her teens, she moved further and further away from her Disney good girl image.

This emancipation was solidified with the album cycle for Bangerz — which included the hits We Can’t Stop and Wrecking Ball.

The stage antics were so notorious that a planned concert in the Dominican Republic was cancelled by the government on ‘morality grounds’.

“People were like why are you doing this? You’re doing like 100 shows and you’re not going to make any money,” Cyrus says.