“I wish I could wake up every day and know who I’m going to be,” Miley Cyrus, the singer/songwriter and actress, says on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded the morning after the world premiere of James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, which features “Dream As One,” an original song that Cyrus co-wrote and sings, over the film’s end credits — and which, on Monday morning, received a best original song Golden Globe Award nomination. “But,” she continues, “sometimes I even surprise or excite or disappoint myself, because I just so get lost in whatever the idea is in the moment. Sometimes that works in my favor, and sometimes it doesn’t. But it makes for an exciting life.”

Cyrus, 33, has been a household name for nearly 20 years. The daughter of “Achy Breaky Heart” singer/songwriter and actor Billy Ray Cyrus and dancer-turned-manager Tish Cyrus, she was born and raised, until the age of 11, in Nashville, Tennessee. As a kid, she spent considerable time with her father on his tour bus, and also on the Toronto set of a TV show on which he was acting, Doc, on which she was given a cameo and caught the acting bug herself. She soon thereafter began taking acting lessons, landed an agent and was cast in small projects independent of her dad. Then, her mom heard about auditions for a Disney Channel half-hour sitcom called Hannah Montana, about a brunette schoolgirl by day who dons a blonde wig and becomes a pop princess by night.

Cyrus first auditioned for Hannah Montana — specifically, for the supporting role of Lilly, the main character’s best friend, who was eventually played by Emily Osment — when she was just 11, but she was passed over and a pilot was shot with others. Then, that pilot was abandoned, the project was rebooted and Cyrus twice more auditioned, with her family flying her to Los Angeles, at their own cost, to enable her to do so. Eventually, she won the title role, leading the Cyruses to relocate to LA. She shot the pilot at 12, and turned 13 while shooting the first episode after it had been ordered to series. From 2006 through 2011, Hannah Montana was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, generating huge ratings on TV and massive music sales, as well, and making little Miley a world-famous superstar.

“I loved being Hannah, but I wanted to be Miley,” Cyrus recalls two decades later. “I wanted to start building that.” So she soon began releasing records — and touring — as both the character and as herself, landing high on the Billboard charts under both personas. For example, “The Climb” came from the Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack, and “Party in the U.S.A.” from her own EP The Time of Our Lives; both albums were released in 2009, and both made it into the top 5 of the Hot 100. She eventually began taking more deliberate steps away from the Hannah persona, which she found somewhat frightening — “It’s scary when you’re keeping grownups that have families, you’re keeping their lights on, and you’re just a kid” — via the edgier 2010 film The Last Song; the 2010 album Can’t Be Tamed; and, after parting ways with her manager and label, the 2013 Bangerz album.

Bangerz included the hit singles “We Can’t Stop,” which had originally been written for Rihanna, and Cyrus’ first single to reach number one on the Hot 100, “Wrecking Ball.” It was her 2013 MTV VMAs performance of “We Can’t Stop” — in which she emerged from a giant teddy bear, wearing a risque outfit and with her tongue sticking out, grabbed her crotch, put on a giant foam finger and twerked in front of Robin Thicke to “Blurred Lines” — that put the final nail in the coffin of her Hannah persona. Surely Cyrus knew that that performance would provoke widespread backlash from many — including parents whose kids regarded Cyrus as a role model — as it did? And surely she wanted a reaction? “It’s never been about that expectation of reaction for me,” she insists. “My mom is somehow the brains behind all the crazy things that people go, ‘How could her mother let her do that?!’ It’s like, ‘It was her idea!’ [Actually,] it was all my idea, but my mom just really supported it. I wasn’t really going for the reaction so much. What I cared about most was that teddy bear! I was, like, obsessed with it. I wanted to work with this artist, Todd James, who made it and made all the costumes. Again, I was focused on the creative part.”

Cyrus says that she was actually oblivious to the controversy that she had caused until Donald Trump, of all people, reached out to her: “I didn’t know what the big deal was, and never thought it was a big deal, until I woke up the next day. I was staying at the Trump hotel and Trump sent me a message that said, ‘Don’t let them get you down,’ and I was like, ‘But why would I be down?’ And then I turned on the TV and I was like, ‘Oh, because everyone in the world is making fun of me.’”

In the years after that, Cyrus experienced a considerable amount of personal turmoil — “My house had recently burned down [in November 2018], I had gotten a divorce [from Liam Hemsworth], my personal life was literally on fire” — but her music just got better and better. A 2019 performance in front of hundreds of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival in England was a triumph; her 2023 album Endless Summer Vacation was an acclaimed hit, and one of its singles, “Flowers,” brought her the first two Grammys of her career, including record of the year; and she began offering to write original songs for screen projects that she felt a connection to. Last year, she contributed the tune “Beautiful That Way” to The Last Showgirl, which starred her friend Pamela Anderson, and it brought her a Golden Globe nomination. Also last year, she ran into Cameron at Disney’s D23 event, at which they were both being inducted as Disney Legends, Cyrus as the youngest inductee ever. She recalls, “I was waiting line for my turn, and I said, ‘Do you need a song?’ And he did.”

For the third installment in his Avatar film franchise — following 2009’s Avatar and 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, which are the first and third highest-grossing films of all time — Cameron wanted a ballad to play over the end credits, and requested that it be titled “Dream As One.” Cyrus embraced the challenge: “I feel that I’m someone that, if I can go and get myself by a piano, can write a song that feels like it’s large-scale enough to flow into something like Avatar — because it needed to fit — but I also can write something that’s intimate and emotional enough that can hopefully bring the heart forward.”

She teamed up with Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt and Simon Franglen to do so, watching early cuts of the film and immersing herself in its world while working on the song. “We projected Pandora into the studio,” she reveals. “I was actually in Sunset Sound, but I could create the world of Avatar around me, and that was really inspiring.” She would also chat by phone with Cameron for hours. “He has a pretty amazing perspective on love, life, death, grief, trauma, healing, resilience, courage, faith. That was more important to me, for the songwriting process, than even getting to watch the movie itself, because it’s his imagination, so getting into his mind on how he perceives the human experience, that was really, really helpful.”

Amazingly, the version of the song that is in the film and garnering awards almost was abandoned. “We did a lot of songwriting sessions,” Cyrus explains. “We actually wrote the song that it is now, ‘Dream As One,’ and we threw it out — we got rid of it — and we wrote another one. And then that one didn’t feel quite right, and we left, and we came back and listened to the other one — the one that’s out now — and we’re like, ‘That’s the one’ — and then we threw it away again! And then we wrote another song. And then Mark was out of town, and I called Mark and said, ‘Okay, should we really abandon that one?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know, let’s just take a break.’ And then he comes back in town, and there’s another song, and we listen to it, and then I’m like, ‘Let’s listen to ‘Dream As One’ one more time,’ and we do, and everyone goes, ‘Forget these other songs, it’s ‘Dream As One.’ And we went back to day one.”

What Cyrus loves about Avatar: Fire and Ash is that it’s about a “chosen family,” something that she relates to, having become tremendously close with her bandmates and other collaborators over the decades. She also loves the Avatar-esque idea that one’s voice is a reflection of both the head and the heart. And, having lost her home in a fire, the title and message of the film speak to her directly: “It’s about resilience and building from the ground up, and part of that is strength and fighting back.”

What’s next for Cyrus? She hopes to keep writing and performing songs that reach and move the masses — and says that she would love to do so for a Bond movie. (“I definitely would. I actually feel like kind of my last album, a lot of people, when they were listening to songs like ‘Easy Lover,’ they would say ‘This sounds like a Bond song.’”) She wants to provide a good example for the new generation of pop stars who say she inspired them, including Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. (“I hope that the way that I’m living life now, where I’m really balanced between personal life and professional, I hope that kind of inspires them as much as the kind of height of what I was doing. I hope now that these women can see that you can have a really healthy personal existence.”)

And yes, Cyrus will be getting married again. Indeed, on the morning of this recording, she confirmed reports of her engagement to drummer Maxx Morando, who she featured in the music video for “End of the World,” a song from her most recent studio album, 2025’s Something Beautiful, that she wrote when she was missing her mom. She describes it as “my love letter to the two pillars of my life that really keep me where I am now, which is the best I’ve ever been.”