IT’S not often you get one of America’s hottest young movie stars chatting to you down the line from Los Angeles, casually confirming all the gossip-column rumours about her love life.
But that’s exactly what happened when Miley Cyrus and I shared a cosy trans-Atlantic chin-wag.
Thanks to the recent Icelandic volcanic ash disaster, which grounded all flights in and out of the UK, the 17-year-old star of the Hannah Montana TV series and hit spin-off film was unable to attend the European tour for new movie, The Last Song, or the premiere in London’s West End.
Hence the superstar Hollywood phone call – and the good news is she’s as chatty, unguarded and unabashed as any teenage girl when it comes to affairs of the heart.
Cyrus and hunky co-star, Liam Hemsworth, 20, got tongues wagging at the US premiere for the film when it became clear by their body language on the red carpet that their relationship was more than just that of co-stars – and she reveals that the camera-friendly couple did indeed fall in love during the making of the movie.
At what point did she suspect that Hemsworth might be someone a bit more to her than just another acting colleague?
“I’m not really sure – it was a little bit into the film,” she says, without hesitation. “We weren’t really ‘official’ until the end of the movie, because we were just trying to keep it super-professional.
“And once you do tell everyone, if something bad happens or whatever, it’s awkward when you’re on set, so we just kept it fun and easy-going. We’ve been together for a while.”
As well as introducing Cyrus to her new beau, The Last Song is an important film in the career of the singer-actress, as it presents her with her first grown-up role away from the sugar-sweet character that’s turned her into a global phenomenon – Hannah Montana.
That role of an ordinary country girl with a secret, double life as a pop star is one that Cyrus has perfected in four seasons of the Disney Channel series of the same name, and a box office conquering movie.
The role has also helped her become the youngest-ever recording artist, with four chart-topping albums to her credit in less than three years.
The Last Song, however, gives her something a little meatier and more realistic to portray, reflecting the fact that Cyrus will be 18 later this year.
Based on the novel by the seemingly ubiquitous Nicholas Sparks – author of best-selling page-to-screen tear-jerkers The Notebook, Message in a Bottle and current UK chart-topper Dear John – the story is set in a small Southern beach town where estranged father Steve Miller (Greg Kinnear) gets the chance to spend the summer with his reluctant and difficult teenage daughter Ronnie (Cyrus), who would much rather be home in New York.
Steve tries to reconnect with Ronnie through the only thing that they have in common – music.
It’s a poignant story of family and friendships, and also of burgeoning first love, after the emotionally closed-off Ronnie begins to let her guard down with local volleyball whizz-kid Will (Hemsworth) whom she meets on the beach.
The pair actually met two weeks before filming started.
“We had a reading together – they wanted to see how we were together, like a chemistry test, I guess,” reveals Tennessee-born Cyrus.
A fortnight later, the two were sharing their first on-screen kiss together.
“That was the very first day of filming,” she recalls, breaking out into laughter.
“It was nice to get it out of the way. It’s your job, so you’re professional, but it was a good way to break the ice, I guess.”
It’s still a Disney movie, but the tender romantic scenes Cyrus shares with Hemsworth are more emotional than anything she’s done in the Hannah Montana outings.
“Sure, those scenes are more adult than anything else I’ve done.
“There are scenes where we’re underwater, and when we’re kissing on the beach, and then when he puts some seashells around me – I think that’s going to be something that people do.
“They’ll go, ‘That’s what they did in The Last Song, it’s so cute.’”
The loved-up twosome also get to have a very messy on-screen mud-fight, after Will’s truck gets stuck in boggy ground.
“We did a lot more of the mud fighting than is actually in the movie – they made us do it for literally a whole day, because they didn’t know where the scene would go,” reveals Cyrus. “At one point, I lost my diamond ring in the mud, and I was freaking out.
“I had to find it without freaking everyone else out – but I found it. It was a ring my dad gave me, so it was kind of important.”
Her father is country star Billy Ray Cyrus, who had an international hit with Achy Breaky Heart in 1992.
Watching The Last Song, not unsurprisingly, proved an emotional experience for him, as the film truly tugs on the heart-strings when Cyrus’ on-screen dad, played by Greg Kinnear, proves to be fatally ill.
“My dad’s seen the movie, and yes, he got a little emotional,” says Cyrus.
“But then I think all dads will get emotional watching it – it’s impossible not too.”
One aspect of Cyrus’ performance in The Last Song which may surprise the millions of young fans who’ve bought her records is she hardly sings in the movie.
Her character Ronnie, a musical child prodigy, does however play the piano, something Cyrus had to learn especially for the part.
“I’m happy that I didn’t sing much in the movie,” says Cyrus. “I wanted it to be about the storyline, and not about me turning it into a musical.
“As for playing the piano, it was hard, but I’m a musician, and I play the guitar, so I can read music already, and that made it a little bit easier than have to start from scratch.”
As we speak, Cyrus is in the middle of a short break while completing the fourth and final series of Hannah Montana.
“We’ve only got two more episodes to film, so I’m going through mixed emotions,” she confesses.
Her next film is LOL, a remake of a French movie which will see Demi Moore play her mother.
“The mom is going through this mid-life crisis, and she’s got herself into drugs, and she’s messing around with the wrong guys, but she doesn’t want to tell her daughter, who she puts on a pedestal,” explains Cyrus.
“Then she finds her daughter’s diary, and it turns out her daughter is doing the same things, and worse, and she’s not the goody two-shoes the mom thought she was. So they’re kind of going through the same thing, at the same time, at different ages.”
This one, not too surprisingly, isn’t a Disney movie. “No, we’re doing it independently, because I want to do this film the way I want to do it, and I don’t want anyone telling me you can’t do that because you were Hannah Montana.”
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