Everyone Gets an Interview

Around 2013, Miley Cyrus stopped being a Disney product and started being herself, and the world lost its mind about it. The twerking, the tongue, the naked-on-a-wrecking-ball visual that somehow became both a meme and a genuine piece of pop art—all of it arrived with the force of someone who’d been managed and packaged since childhood and was now aggressively refusing that arrangement. The backlash was enormous and largely misogynistic, and she seemed to find it funny.

By 2017 she’d settled into something more comfortable. Public Access was a talk show she hosted, and the premise was deliberately low-key: interview interesting people beside a pool in California. Balloons. A yellow inflatable cow. Summer light. The guest list was the interesting part—81-year-old aerial acrobat Carla Wallenda, 66-year-old pole artist Greta Pontarelli, her younger sister Noah Cyrus, rapper Buddy, comedian Brandon Wardell, 19-year-old inventor Ann Makosinski. Billy Ray Cyrus wandered through because of course he did.

What worked about the format was its refusal to be important. No desk, no panel, no performed informality in an expensive studio. The mix of ages and backgrounds gave it an energy that most celebrity-interview formats don’t bother with—you got the sense that Miley was genuinely curious about what Carla Wallenda had to say after eight decades on a wire, which is different from performing curiosity on camera, and the difference matters.

She was never just the Disney girl or the Miley-Went-Wild tabloid story. The thing that got lost in both narratives—the wholesome one and the outrageous one—was that she seemed to actually enjoy other people. That sounds like nothing. Watch most talk show hosts for twenty minutes and you’ll understand why it isn’t.