Miley Cyrus Explains Why She’s in Awe of Woody Allen: “He’s Never Fake (original) (raw)
Miley Cyrus is returning to TV for the first since her days as Disney's Hannah Montana. This fall, the singer and actress is appearing as a coach on NBC's _The Voice_—and starring in Woody Allen's highly anticipated first television series, Crisis in Six Scenes, on Amazon. She plays a marijuana-dealing hippie who turns a conservative 1960s household completely upside down with her radical thinking.
To celebrate the show's debut, Cyrus joined Allen at the premiere of the Amazon series, held at New York's Crosby Street Hotel on Thursday night—but boycotted the red carpet. She recently vowed to Elle magazine that she would “never do a red carpet again.” The pop star kept her promise by slipping into the event, bypassing red-carpet photographers and reporters entirely. She did pose for a few photos in the hotel lobby, and exclusively chatted with Vanity Fair outside the screening room about working with Allen, who wrote, directed, and stars in the six-episode comedy series, which begins streaming on September 30.
“What I love about Woody Allen is that he’s never putting anything on. He’s never fake and he’s exactly who he is through and through,” said Cyrus. “For me, I have the highest respect of anyone who is truly themselves. He even runs his set in a way that is truly him. He’s super-resourceful and he’s not over the top. The budget of the movie goes into the project. It doesn’t go into fuckin’ crème brûlée for everybody and a hot tub in your trailer,” she added. “It’s for the project. So the styling, the casting, the location, the sets, it’s all the best. He doesn’t use anything that’s luxury and a waste of money, which I really like. I think every set should be like his.”
The chance to share the screen and go head-to-head with the critically lauded actor and director was a career highlight for Cyrus. She says she never felt intimidated by him, and her time with Allen was more of a learning experience.
“I was playing so much of myself that I wasn’t really feeling any pressure as an actress,” said Cyrus, whose last lead acting role was in the 2012 action-comedy So Undercover. “I had so much fun, and it was the best experience. I learned a lot by watching the way he worked. I love that I didn’t have to do things a million times. There is like magic in the way he does things and gets the right angles. He sets everything up in the right way, where you do two takes. You don’t do multiple takes. You don’t do multiple angles. He’s done this for such a long time that he’s perfected what he wants, so the actors aren’t like, in a vegan saying, beating a dead horse. He’s really awesome.”
The Oscar-winning director, 80, has the same mutual respect for Cyrus. He recalled that he was instantly drawn to her comedy skills when he first laid eyes on her as Hannah Montana.
“Miley’s a pleasure to work with. She couldn’t have been better,” Allen told Vanity Fair. “My kids used to watch that silly little television show that she did. I would walk past the screen and I used to think, Who is that girl? She has a great comic delivery. She’s really wonderful. Years later, she then emerged as a singer and as an actress, and I thought she would be great for this character. I took a chance and hired her. She exceeded my finest expectations. She’s 100 percent professional. She knows her work and comes in and hits her mark. She’s also sweet to everybody. She poses for pictures and signs all the autographs without complaining. I absolutely enjoyed working with her.”
Allen, whose storied career has spanned six decades, admits that helming a scripted television series is more difficult than he originally thought, but creating a show set in the turbulent 1960s gave him great satisfaction. It’s an era he fondly remembers.
“The 60s were a nice time for me. I was playing in a Broadway show. I had a big romance with Diane Keaton, and I started to emerge as a filmmaker. It was a very nice time in my life,” he recalled. “I have a nice memory of it, but I’m sure it wasn’t as nice as I remember.”
