Miley Cyrus Dodges Question About Estrangement From Dad Billy Ray Cyrus
Miley Cyrus is opening up about where her relationship stands with her parents, Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus.
The “Flowers” singer made an appearance on the latest season of David Letterman’s Netflix show, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” and addressed everything from the “narcissism” she inherited from her dad to her family’s rumored estrangement.
The former “Hannah Montana” star told Letterman about her connection with her father, after Letterman asked if she ever felt that Billy Ray was her “hero.”
“I mean, honestly, my mom is my hero,” Cyrus said. “My father... I’m grateful for ― first, his genes. My dad has great hair, and I got that. But also he has a relationship and a foot on the ground to the real, and to nature, and he always did, even when he was super famous.”
“I’m grateful for being able to watch him ahead of me,” Cyrus said of her “Achy Breaky Heart” father, who also co-starred on her Disney show. “He’s almost given me this map. And there’s a map of what to do and what not to do, and he’s guided me on both.”
Cyrus said that she has “a lot of love” for her dad, but told Letterman she “also inherited the narcissism from my father,” and that she really credits her mother with raising her.
She added that her parents “can’t be weighed on the same scale” in terms of the roles they played in her upbringing.
“My dad, as a creative and as an artist in the way that his brain works, has always made me feel safer in my own mind, because we’re very similar in some of our ideas,” she told Letterman.
“I think a lot of his perspective on reality and on life, I’ve inherited from him, more so than the way that I was raised,” she said. “Which, really, my mom raised me.”
Letterman told Cyrus that it seemed like “there’s not estrangement here with your father, it’s just, kinda, the way things are played?”
“Yeah,” Cyrus said, sidestepping the question. “I think, what is so beautiful is that my parents ― they served their children, and I know this. My parents served us and sacrificed so much for us. Anything we dreamed of, they made possible.”
It was rumored that Cyrus and her father were estranged after various members of the famous family appeared to take sides following Tish and Billy Ray’s divorce in 2022.
Last year, Cyrus and two of her siblings attended Tish’s wedding to “Prison Break” star Dominic Purcell. Cyrus’ sister Noah, 24, did not attend, as she’d reportedly dated the 54-year-old actor before he married her mother.
Cyrus also left her father out of her acceptance speech when she took home her first Grammy earlier this year, though she thanked her mom, her sister Brandi and her boyfriend, Maxx Morando.
“All the people that we love. I don’t think I’ve forgotten anyone,” Cyrus said at the time. “But I might have forgotten underwear ― bye!”
