Miley Cyrus went through an “identity crisis” following her success as her alter-ego Hannah Montana.
Miley Cyrus
The 28-year-old singer rose to fame portraying the main character in the Disney Channel series ‘Hannah Montana’, which saw her play a version of herself named Miley Stewart, who was a regular teenager who lives a secret double life as the eponymous pop star.
And now, Miley has revealed taking part in the show – which ran from 2006 to 2011 and starred her real-life father Billy Ray Cyrus as her on-screen dad Robby Ray Stewart – made her feel as though no-one would “care about” her unless she continued to pretend she was Hannah Montana.
She explained: “The concept of the show is that when you’re this character, when you have this alter ego, you’re valuable. You’ve got millions of fans, you’re the biggest star in the world. Then the concept was that when I looked like myself, when I didn’t have the wig on anymore, no one cared about me. I wasn’t a star anymore.
“That was drilled into my head [that], without being Hannah Montana, no one cares about you. That was the concept. I really had to break that.”
The ‘Midnight Sky’ hitmaker went on to say she had an “identity crisis” in the years after the Disney series ended, because she had stopped playing the character and didn’t know how to be herself.
She added during an appearance on Spotify’s ‘Rock This with Allison Hagendorf’ podcast: “I think that’s maybe why I almost created a characterised version of myself at times … I never created a character where it wasn’t me, but I was aware of how people saw me and I kind of played into it a little bit.
“Like, when I noticed that people gave a s*** that I would stick my tongue out, when they told me, ‘Stop sticking your f****** tongue out,’ I would do it more … When people are p*****, that means they care, so that makes you want to do it, too.”
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