Miley Cyrus is fed up with walking the red carpet, y’all, and she has taken to the cover of the October issue of Elle to tell us about it. Top by Chloé, photo by Terry Tsiolis, realness by Miley.
“[A year ago] I had to do the [A Very Murray Christmas] premiere, and I will never do a red carpet again,” she tells the magazine. “Why, when people are starving, am I on a carpet that’s red? Because I’m ‘important’? Because I’m ‘famous’? That’s not how I roll. It’s like a skit—it’s like Zoolander.”
Cyrus grew up around celebrity—Dolly Parton is her godmother—and she began starring on Hannah Montana in 2006. Ten years into her own fame, she is in a woke phase, and it’s often endearing, even meaningful: She has launched a foundation to support homeless LGBTQ teens and she promotes that cause relentlessly. Apparently she ditched her publicist a year ago, and has been relying on Instagram to communicate with fans since then. She graciously agreed to appear on the cover of Elle because she wanted “to do something like this where we are really talking, rather than somebody talking at me for five seconds.” And also to promote her upcoming stint as a coach on The Voice, where, she tells Elle, she’ll advise contestants to “Be Bernie Sanders. Be the person people want and love. Don’t worry about the masses.”
In Cyrus’ defense, red carpets really are “like a skit.” The actors walk sloooowly past the line of screaming photographers, stopping to grin and pout at different angles, and—most cringe-worthily—laughing in faux-candid delight. If you have ever seen a video of someone who wrongly thinks they’re posing for a photograph (hi, Rihanna!), you get the idea. Cyrus’ Zoolander comparison is perfectly apt. It’s all pretty embarrassing.
The problem with her logic is that everything about being a celebrity is pretty embarrassing. Dressing up and being ogled by strangers is embarrassing. Spending an entire day answering inane questions in hotel rooms is embarrassing. Anything stupid about red carpets extends to any aspect of being famous. “Why, when people are starving, am I [twerking on Robin Thicke / singing to an enormous statue of a dead dog / doing an interview with Elle]”?
I have done a bit of red-carpet reporting in the past, which makes me sympathetic to Cyrus’ disdain. I remember covering the New York premiere of the (terrible) M. Night Shyamalan movie The Village in 2004, and seeing actor Michael Pitt race down the carpet as fast as he could, ducking interviewers and photographers along the way. I don’t know why he didn’t participate that night, but it struck me at the time as the most dignified way to approach the whole greasy circus. Then again, I was 24 at the time, and Pitt was 23, just like Miley is now. He has walked many red carpets since then, and I’m going to go ahead and guess that Cyrus will, too. Yes, performing the dancing-monkey routine of modern celebrity is ridiculous. But it’s also well-compensated, glamorous work. Complaining about it is never a good look. If she’s worried about the fact that “people are starving,” she could start working full-time at a soup kitchen. But she could also hack the red carpet and turn it into a megaphone.
