Miley Cyrus is back to Disney — here’s how she was saved from child-star curse
On her unshakable smash “Flowers,” Miley Cyrus rises triumphantly from the ashes of her very public — and very nasty — breakup with “The Hunger Games” actor Liam Hemsworth after just eight months of marriage in 2019.
With the viral TikTok bop spending six weeks at No. 1 since it was released on Jan. 13 (which just so happens to be Hemsworth’s birthday) — Cyrus’ career once again in full bloom ten years after she first ruled the charts with “Wrecking Ball.”
She’s got a new album, “Endless Summer Vacation” and an accompanying Disney+ special, both out Friday.
“She’s in a new great space,” Stacy Barthe — who has remained friends with Cyrus since co-writing her 2013 single “Adore You” — told The Post. “This is a new kind of chapter. She’s just evolving — and I’m excited to see where it goes from here.”
Along the way, Cyrus — who began starring in “Hannah Montana” when she was 13 in 2006 and recently turned 30 — has managed to avoid the child-star curse that has hit many of her generation and beyond.
“Pre-dating Miley was former Disney princess and Mouseketeer Britney Spears, and we all know how Britney’s story went,” Lori Majewski, host of SiriusXM’s “Fierce: Women in Music,” told The Post.
“And even Miley’s contemporaries Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez have both really battled inner demons … But Miley was so close to her family that she had champions that led her out of the ‘good girl that everybody wants her to be’ phase and into [being] the artist who she wants to be.”
Barthe also credits that solid family foundation, which of course includes her country-star father Billy Ray Cyrus — and godmother Dolly Parton.
“I mean, she’s a very family-oriented person,” said Barthe, who has her own album coming out later this year. “So I think that’s the advantage that she had over a lot of child stars who, you know, got attacked by drugs and alcohol and all those things.”
Grammy-nominated hitmaker Claude Kelly — who co-wrote Cyrus’ breakout song “Party in the U.S.A.” with Jessie J and Dr. Luke — remembers being struck by Cyrus’ poise and professionalism as a 16-year-old when they recorded the 2009 single under the watchful eye of her mother Tish at a Savannah, Ga., studio.
“I was pretty impressed by how well adjusted she was with all that fame at 16,” said Kelly, whose Louis York outfit has a new single, “Heaven Bound” (featuring Jessie J), out March 17.
“At one point we went to Sonic to get tater tots. And we all kind of forgot how famous she was,” he told The Post. “And as we were waiting in the line, the word traveled that fast that Miley was out at Sonic, and we had to get out of there pretty quickly because the fans were [coming].
“But she was very chill, not flustered, not panicky about it,” he said. “There’s people who were three times her age that can’t handle that kind of pressure.”
Still, there were concerns she’d perhaps go off the rails after she became the twerking talk of the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards and went nude in the “Wrecking Ball” video.
“Everyone really thought she had lost her mind [after the VMAs],” said Majewski, “but she freed herself from expectation, she freed herself from having to be the Disney princess.”
Meanwhile, her family stuck by her as she burned her Hannah Montana image.
“She just needed and wanted so bad to break out of that and wanted to become Miley Cyrus and she tried every way in the world to do it and nobody would let her go,” Parton told US Weekly in 2014. “So, she just had to resort to extreme measures but she pulled it off.”
Since then, Cyrus has continued to earn music cred with projects that found her boldly venturing into psych rock (2015’s “Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz,” a collaboration with the Flaming Lips) and country (2017’s “Younger Now”), while collaborating with older legends such as Billy Idol and Joan Jett on 2020’s “Plastic Hearts.”
In August 2019, Cyrus and Hemsworth — whom she had an on-again-off-again relationship since falling in love on the set of the 2010 film “The Last Song” — announced they were separating; the divorce would be finalized early the following year.
She later admitted she had found herself falling off track during the tail-end of her marriage.
“At that time,” Cyrus told Rolling Stone later that year, “my experimentation with drugs and booze and the circle of people around me was not fulfilling or sustainable or ever going to get me to my fullest potential and purpose.”
She seems to have found it — and her family, even singing with Parton on “Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party” last December.
“Miley is a Pilates girl, she’s a yoga girl. She eats really well. She reads a lot of books,” said Barthe. “She’s super duper smart and what we would like to call woke … as far as spirituality goes, as far as all those things go.
