The Hannah Montana effect: How Miley Cyrus turned a Disney image into a brazen, boundary-breaking career

In Season 2 of Hannah Montana, an overwhelmed Hannah, the pop star who also lives as a 'regular' school-going teenager Miley Stewart, is told rather brusquely that she needs to change herself or risk losing her fans. She understands this simplistically: Change the outfits, change the singing style.

Miley, Hannah’s alter ego, spends nights fretting. In typical Disney Channel-style slapstick and exaggerated fashion, she decides to 'experiment.' Retro doesn’t work for her, nor does rap. She tries her own version of metal—complete with raucous guitar playing, horrifying her friends and her father, played by Billy Ray Cyrus. She goes for noise. An event meant to showcase sunshine and joy is instead transformed into a ear-splitting mess due to Hannah’s “new look,” leaving her bewildered at what she has done. It turns out to be a dream, thankfully.

For those who watched Hannah Montana in the early 2000s, didn’t quite realise how this would actually mirror Miley Cyrus’s own career later, and how she would wrestle free from her Disney image.  The legacy still runs strong even if that ‘old’ Miley doesn't exist.

More than a half a billion hours of the show have been streamed on Disney+. In fact, the Season 1 album was the first TV soundtrack to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and Cyrus’ 2007 ‘Best of Both Worlds’ tour sold out 71 arenas across North America. It had a documentary in tow, which was also the highest-grossing concert film upon its release.  “There were times where Hannah Montana felt like the Beatles or something,”Cyrus later told Variety.

Yet becoming a widely marketed 'ideal' teenage role model also manifested a sense of rebellion that would later surface at award shows, most notably at the MTV VMAs, when Cyrus shed her Disney image in a more provocative performance. “From the time I was 11, it was, ‘You’re a pop star! That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing,’” Cyrus explained to Marie Claire in 2015. “Meanwhile, I’m this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras.”

She has also spoken about feeling shaped into someone she was not, contributing to struggles with body image. “I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn’t on that show, it was like, who am I?”

And, so, she had to figure out who she was. The world did too, along with her. Cyrus later 'took a wrecking ball' to her Disney image, literally and figuratively. Her song Wrecking Ball marked a stark visual and tonal shift, with her long hair replaced by a short, cropped style, a far cry from the polished image of Hannah Montana.

.Her ‘scandals’ caused a significant amount of controversy, but  her godmother Dolly Parton defended her and said, “The girl can write. The girl can sing. The girl is smart. And she doesn't have to be so drastic. But I will respect her choices. I did it my way, so why can't she do it her way?”

 And Cyrus did, it in her own way. The saccharine wholesome days of Hannah Montana were left behind, with Cyrus carving a more brazen image of herself, skating through each and every personal controversy in the public eye, especially her turbulent marriage with Liam Hemsworth.

 But Cyrus, quite like her Grammy’s performance in 2024 when she sang award-winning single Flowers, dances it out with a bold, brazen fervour. “I just won my first Grammy,” she had said, changing the lines of her own song and danced, while Taylor Swift notably cheered from the crowd.

 For those who watched her back in 2006 as Hannah Montana, it has been a journey, of watching her sing angsty romance tracks, to more profound grief-ridden ones and even attempt a Metallica cover Nothing Else Matters with power. She might not be the Miley Stewart of Disney days that many once envisioned, but she is Miley Cyrus, and that is a name to reckon with.