Over the Christmas break, a little nugget of joy crept into our Instagram feeds. On December 23rd, Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth got married in what appears to be a low-key ceremony with just family and close friends. For those overly familiar with Cyrus the popstar and Hemsworth the actor's relationship, this move was slightly unexpected but welcomed with open arms.
As a little wedding present to the pair, this week’s VBF column celebrates Cyrus and Hemsworth as a newly-enforced team . . . and we’re also keeping our options open with the possibility of writing about Cyrus at a later date. She has a new album coming out in 2019, you know, so she’s bound to deliver something deemed worthy of another VBF column. We’re dead sure about that but for now, it’s all about love.
Ten years ago, Cyrus was almost certainly the most famous 16-year-old in the world and the then 18-year-old Hemsworth, a former Neighbours star, had just lost out on the role of Thor to his older brother Chris, a former Home and Away star. While Cyrus was still riding so very high on the success as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel series of the same name, which would air its final episode in 2011, she was looking for a post-Montana plan. And that plan just so happened to include a casting in The Last Song, a movie adaption of Nicolas Sparks's novel of the same name, alongside Hemsworth. On the big screen, The Last Song is middling love story that somehow involves hatching loggerhead sea turtle. But offscreen the film brought these two together. A marketing dream, eh?
Teen years
For the rest of their teen years, they had some minor hiccups and break-ups – as most teens would – but they also had Teen Vogue photo shoots together, attended various Oscar parties and were the fodder of Los Angeles paparazzi and gossip sites. By 2012, Cyrus was sporting an engagement ring but as any keen Cyrus fan will know that in and around 2012, as her hair length grew shorter and she added more peroxide to her tresses, she seemed to get itchy feet; artistically and personally. The summer of 2013 was a testy time for all of us. In the build-up to Cyrus's album Bangerz – which was, in fact, loaded with bangers – she performed We Can't Stop at the MTV Video Music Awards in August and twerked. Yes, your honour, she twerked. In September, she unfollowed Hemsworth on Twitter. The engagement is off.
Between the years of 2013 and 2015, the pair of them got up to what can only be described as shenanigans. More twerking ensued, hammers were licked and Cyrus released a psychedelic but ultimately very sweet album called Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. Hemsworth was caught smooching Mexican actresses and Cyrus went out with a Schwarzenegger but all of that would soon become irrelevant when an Instagram post showed Cyrus helping Hemsworth adopt a dog in late 2015. And slowly but surely . . . those kids got their act together again.
As their shared home in Malibu was destroyed by the Woolsey fires in November 2018, Cyrus did some press around that (and also to promote Nothing Breaks Like a Heart, her new single with Mark Ronson). Appearing on the Howard Stern Show in early December, she avoided calling Hemsworth her fiancé but instead referred to him as her "survival partner" as she praised him for rescuing their pets from the fire. But always one to do the unexpected, she put a ring on her survival partner and, in turn, melted our icy, icy hearts.
