ABCPlaying a character with two identities on Hannah Montana left Miley Cyrus with an identity crisis in real life.
The singer tells Spotify’s Rock This with Allison Hagendorf podcast that the premise of the Disney Channel show messed with her sense of self.
“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,” Miley explained. “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.”
She added, “That was drilled into my head [that], without being Hannah Montana, no one cares about you…I really had to break that.”
Miley said she went through an “identity crisis” in the years after the show and often played into people’s ideas about her.
“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,” she says, referencing her Bangerz era. “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 pissed, that means they care, so that makes you want to do it, too.”
Miley, who signed a new record deal with Columbia Records this week, says 2013’s Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz was the album where she really began to find herself and considers it her favorite work to date.
By Andrea Tuccillo
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