Not many child stars escape the Magic Kingdom.
Jodie Foster, who appeared in “Freaky Friday” early in her long career, is a role model — and an exception. For every Disney kid who makes it big, from Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake, and the rest of the “All-New Mickey Mouse Club” gang, there are many others who either eventually flame out with painful personal struggles or, locked into star personas attached to them in childhood, just fade away. Shia LaBeouf’s current struggles in the public eye, decades after the Disney Channel audience discovered him on “Even Stevens,” are only the latest example in a timeworn pattern — fame bestowed at an early age is hard to maintain and perhaps harder to survive.
Which makes Miley Cyrus an anomaly. Cyrus, who once joked, on “Saturday Night Live,” that Hannah Montana had been “murdered,” has come to coexist peacefully with the character who brought her to fame, and to evolved beyond Hannah in ways that make her, still, one of our most intriguing stars. In her new “Hannah Montana” 20th-anniversary special for Disney+, Cyrus proves herself to be, these days, one of our most reliable performers. That she had to go through hell, and several different iterations of herself, to get there only makes her star power clearer.
On “Hannah Montana,” which ran from 2006 to 2011, Cyrus played a school-aged girl living a double life, as Miley Stewart — a normal teen — and as the title popstar — the identity she took on when she put on a blonde wig. The idea was that, out of costume, “Miley” might be able to live a conventional life. The real Miley, who, as she points out in the special, had ambivalent feelings about leaving behind her passion for cheerleading at her Nashville school in order to act on TV, had no such luxury. Before Selena Gomez (whose “Wizards of Waverly Place” launched in 2007) and before Zendaya (whose “Shake It Up” kicked off in 2010, followed by “K.C. Undercover” in 2015), Cyrus was the definitional Disney Channel star, mobbed by fans and closely scrutinized by parents curious about what exactly their kids were watching.
And the media covering Cyrus gave those parents plenty of material. Cyrus, at 15, appeared in the pages of Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz and clutching what appeared to be a bedsheet to her unclothed body — and this was only two years into “Hannah Montana’s” run. The image was hardly pornographic, but it created an uncomfortably risqué perception problem for a star whose audience were kids younger than herself. And it became a multi-day news story. (“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” Cyrus said in a prepared statement. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.” She had previously told Vanity Fair’s reporter that the image was “really cool” and “really artsy.”) Two years later, Cyrus, just after her eighteenth birthday, saw a leaked video of her smoking salvia from a bong leaked to TMZ. Another long press cycle ensued.
It’s become almost de rigeur, in the years following the bombshell 2021 documentary “Framing Britney Spears” and Spears’ subsequent release from her conservatorship, for us to re-evaluate the way we spoke about and treated young women in the public eye. Cyrus seems especially due for that treatment, in part because of how cleanly old narratives about her have been sheaved away. The mania about Cyrus as bad influence was absurd on its face then — she was a young woman testing boundaries, a hardly novel situation — but seems even more so now that she has grown into a star who is just about as pulled-together a celebrity as we have. Suffering no hangover from the character she tried out in the “Wrecking Ball” days, Cyrus spends the entirety of her Disney+ special speaking thoughtfully and with sharp wit about what Hannah meant to her then, what she means to her now, and what she’s always meant to Cyrus’ fans.
Cyrus is a born entertainer, as is made clear in — to name just one moment from her new special — when the special’s host Alex Cooper asks the singer about how Taylor Swift’s cameo in the 2009 “Hannah Montana” movie came about. (It gives some sense of the scope and scale of Cyrus’ fame that she booked a post-”Fearless” swift to appear as a supporting act in her movie.) And Cyrus delivers a perfect bit of shady wit, saying that they needed a singer whose career was so nascent that she might credibly be performing in a barn, after alluding to the idea that she might need to lawyer up to say anything less than glowing about her peer. But a moment like that is candy for the uninitiated; in the main, Cyrus is laser-focused on delivering for her fans, performing old “Hannah Montana” songs with all the showmanship she’s gained in the years since and joking about how giddy she feels to have been named a Disney Legend.
Elsewhere, any whiff of drama around Cyrus is purposefully but thoughtfully deactivated. Her father Billy Ray Cyrus, the “Achy Breaky Heart” singer who also played her dad on the Disney Channel, appears for a sweet cameo, despite past acknowledgments that there had been family tumult over the years. And Chappell Roan — a pop star who is only five years Cyrus’ junior, but who falls on the other side of a colossal generational shift — appears to tell Cyrus that “the world took it out on you” and that Cyrus absorbed a lot of criticism so that younger stars might not have to. (Roan is certainly no stranger to controversy herself, but Cyrus provides a model of what it looks like to shake it off and stride forward.)
If Hannah Montana was murdered way back when, Cyrus performed an act of mercy in bringing her back to life in 2026. I write this not from the perspective of a fan of the show: I was headed to college when the show began, and viewed Hannah’s and Cyrus’ exploits, from afar, through the eye of someone curious about media culture. But it’s remarkable, and a bit brave, to demonstrate that one can come through a moment of living at the center of celebrity culture, thrash against it for a while, and eventually lean into the pleasure of making fans happy.
At the end of the new special, Cyrus sings a song directed at herself, from the perspective of her younger self. The song acknowledges that, from the perspective of 2006-or-so Miley, the future Miley’s life is probably pretty exciting. “But don’t forget about me,” the lyrics plead. “Don’t forget about me.” In doing just the opposite — integrating a complicated and tough moment into her current public image — Cyrus has proven her mettle, and that she’s done what the Miley on “Hannah Montana” never could, leading a life that looks like her version of normal while delighting audiences, too. And she’s proven, too, that Disney knew exactly what they were doing when they plugged a Nashville cheerleader into a new franchise way back when: They’d found a young woman who’d prove to be an enduring star.
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