Miley Cyrus said playing her alter ego Hannah Montana on her hit Disney show led to an 'identity crisis'
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Miley Cyrus spoke about the "identity crisis" she felt while playing her pop star alter ego Hannah Montana on the hit Disney Channel show between 2006 and 2011.
Cyrus appeared on Spotify's "Rock This with Allison Hagendorf" podcast on Friday, telling the host what it was like playing two characters — a teen girl in the day at school and a global superstar in the evening.
"Talk about an identity crisis," she said. "Like I had gone from being a character almost as often as I was myself."
She told Hagendorf her album "Bangerz" was the first record she had made not being part of the show.
The whole concept of the show, she said, was that when you're the character, you're valuable because you have millions of fans.
"And then the concept was that when I looked like myself, when I didn't have the wig on anymore, that no one cared about me," she said. "I wasn't a star anymore."
She added it was really "drilled" into her head that nobody cared when she wasn't Hannah Montana, so she "really had to break that."
"I think that's maybe why I almost created like a characterized version of myself at times, like in the way of being aware of how other people see me is more what I mean," she said, referencing some of her past experiences, such as twerking on Robin Thicke at the VMAs in 2013.
"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 said. "Like when I noticed that people gave a shit that I would stick my tongue out. When they told me, stop sticking your f---ing tongue out, I would do it more."
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Cyrus spoke about the impact the show had on her back in December in an interview with Rolling Stone.
"I had to evolve because Hannah was larger than life, larger than me," she said. "I felt like I was never going to amount to the success of Hannah Montana."
She added that Hannah Montana was never really a character.
"The concept of the show, it's me," she said. "I've had to really come to terms with that and not be third-person about it."
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