Miley Cyrus has embraced her Hannah Montana past and apologized to Mickey Mouse for her bad girl era following her Disney Channel run.
The “Flowers” singer was honored with the Disney Legend award during the D23 Expo in Anaheim, and she got emotional when she accepted it.
“I’m gonna let everybody get in on a little Disney Legend secret. I’m the one that tells you what you’re not supposed to know,” Cyrus said while accepting the honor. “And what I want to say is that legends get scared, too. I’m scared right now, but the difference is we do it anyway — and all of you can do that every single day. It’s legendary to be afraid, and do it anyway.”
Cyrus joked that in 2005, “Disney was on a mission to rebuild and reimagine the company. That’s why they hired Bob Iger and me.” The singer said she remembered the time “clearly because it was during the auditioning process of Hannah Montana. There was a buzz in that Burbank Disney office where it’s rumored that they create all of us Disney Kids.”
She continued, “I definitely wasn’t created in a lab and if I was there must’ve been a bug in the system which caused me to malfunction somewhere between the years of 2013 and ‘16. Sorry, Mickey.”
Following her run on the Disney Channel as the star of Hannah Montana, Cyrus looked to reinvent her image and caused uproar in a series of performances and public appearances. In 2013, she performed at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she twerked on Robin Thicke during the performance of “Blurred Lines.”
Other Disney Legends honored alongside Cyrus included Angela Bassett, James L. Brooks, James Cameron, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Williams, Frank Oz, Kelly Ripa, and Harrison Ford, among many others.
Lainey Wilson paid homage to Cyrus performing “The Best of Both Worlds,” the Hannah Montana theme song.
