Noah Cyrus is one of the few young artists who’ve charted on the Billboard Hot 100 alongside her famous family, but according to her latest interview, the pros of familial fame don’t always outweigh the cons.
Growing up in the shadow of father Billy Ray Cyrus and older sister Miley Cyrus caused Noah to have a difficult time shining in the solo spotlight, and she opened up about how those dark moments felt in tmrw magazine’s cover story for The Mischief Issue.
“Being in my room with the lights off, hiding from the world, that’s not a way to live for such a young girl,” the 20-year-old artist recalled in the interview, obtained by E! News. “So, you know, whenever I think about how many other people are going through the same thing — especially at the age I was at — there are so many more people out there. I think that whenever I see other artists like myself speaking out and talking about it, it makes me really happy because I didn’t really have that when I was growing up.”
The “Lonely” singer cited being called “Hannah Montana’s sister” and other names that weren’t her own. “Somebody not even coming up to you and calling you by your name?” the youngest Cyrus said. “That’s going to really f— you up as a kid, make you feel like you don’t f—ing even matter to the population — for them to not even know your name.”
Noah described a long list of misconceptions attached to her famous name, including having an impermeable shield against harmful comments, but she painfully felt the impact of those words hurled at her even from across a computer or phone screen. “I think what’s weird about people on the Internet is that they think if you have a well-known last name that whatever they say to you may not hurt your feelings or that whatever they say about you couldn’t possibly make its way to you or hurt you,” she told tmrw. “There’s no mercy from people who see you only as public. I would say what bothers me the most is that people think that they can just say whatever the f— they want, and it doesn’t really have a consequence to it or it doesn’t affect anything ‘cause it’s said over the internet. There’s so much power to the internet. Whether you’re well-known or not, it still f—ing hurts somebody so bad to read the s— that I’ve been reading since I was so young. So many people get that every day, and it’s so f—ed up, man.”
But Noah doesn’t feel ashamed of being a Cyrus: She has it tattooed on her body, as do Miley, Billy Ray and her brother Trace, who formed the LA-based pop band Metro Station before launching a solo career in 2017. “I’ve always understood that I had a ‘powerful’ last name, or a well-known last name, so that’s not really what I wanted to be tied to,” she said in the interview. “I always wanted to be tied to Noah.”
