Miley Cyrus Posed Naked For W Magazine, Got Hilariously Interviewed By Ronan Farrow
Yes, it's weird, but it's also probably one of the more hilariously condescending celebrity profiles you'll ever read.
For those who only know Ronan Farrow as the suspiciously Sinatra-looking son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, a quick Wikipedia search is pretty revealing: the 26-year-old’s also “a journalist, lawyer and former US government advisor”, was a youth spokesperson for UNICEF for almost a decade, and has been named everything from ‘Up-And-Coming Politician’ by Harper’s to ’30 Under 30 Most Influential People’ by Forbes.
Still, it’s pretty fuckin’ weird to see his byline in W Magazine, alongside a series of full-length photos of a clothes-less and eyebrow-less Miley Cyrus. And yet, here we are.
In the publication’s new issue, the two sat down to chat about Miley’s provocative streak, her thoughts on the negative criticism she’s received over the past 12 months, and politics (kinda). The result is probably the most amusing celebrity profile you’ll read, uh, today, in which Farrow slides between bored reporter to condescending piss-taker. I mean, one of Miley’s actual quotes is “I think water’s, like, a really important thing.”
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“I begin to respond, but Cyrus is not listening.”
“This is not my scene,” begins Farrow, after skewering a bunch of 14-year olds outside a Miley concert in L.A. for chewing gum and loving Ariana Grande. He then describes the scene at hand, setting up a great segue where he basically gets Miley to admit she hates her own fans.
A little person prances in a silver leotard with conical foam breasts. Cyrus kneels and squeezes them playfully. Eighteen thousand audience members explode into unhinged jubilation. “Oh, my God,” Kristal shrieks, near tears. “I love her!”
“I don’t love kids,” a tired Cyrus tells me the night before the concert, ashing a cigarette. I begin to respond, but Cyrus is not listening. “I don’t love them because, I mean, I think I was around too many kids at one point—because I was around a lot of kids… They’re so fucking mean.”
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“She is a human text message.”
“She’s Molly Bloom — the character who closes James Joyce’s Ulysses with a chapter of unpunctuated run-on sentences — for the Instagram set,” writes Farrow, probably while glazing over as Miley chatted endlessly. “Cyrus speaks in the language of her generation: She is a human text message.” Still, despite the hilarious condescension in that exchange, he manages to coax Miley into reflecting on the significance behind her provocative image.
“I just don’t get what half the girls are wearing. Everyone to me seems like Vanna White. I’m trying to tell girls, like, ‘Fuck that. You don’t have to wear makeup. You don’t have to have long blonde hair and big titties. That’s not what it’s about. It’s, like, personal style.’ I like that I’m associated with sexuality and the kind of punk-rock shit where we just don’t care. Like Madonna or Blondie or Joan Jett — Jett’s the one that I still get a little shaky around. She did what I did in such a crazier way. I mean, girls then weren’t supposed to wear leather pants and, like, fucking rock out. And she did.”
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“Cyrus seems to have developed a preternatural ability to tune things out. (“I have a hard time listening,” she concedes.)”
“Why don’t you care that you’re appropriating black culture and exploiting little people, Miley? WHY DON’T YOU CARE? DON’T YOU HAVE A BRAIN OR SOMETHING?” Okay, that’s not exactly how Farrow puts it, but we can all read between the lines.
“I don’t give a shit. I’m not Disney, where they have, like, an Asian girl, a black girl, and a white girl, to be politically correct, and, like, everyone has bright-colored T-shirts. You know, it’s like, I’m not making any kind of statement. Anyone that hates on you is always below you, because they’re just jealous of what you have.” Cyrus seems to have developed a preternatural ability to tune things out. (“I have a hard time listening,” she concedes.) That goes for both criticism and other people. “I have a lot of people that I could call and hang out with, but I have very few friends, if that makes any sense,” she tells me. “Like, I just don’t tell a lot of people anything. Everyone’s always like, ‘You’re so sketch.’ ”
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“I stare at her. I literally cannot imagine anyone less like Tennessee Williams’s fragile, lost Blanche DuBois.”
Apparently, Miley got into some new interests following her break-up from Aussie Liam Hemsworth, including art books and Cindy Sherman photographs (“We flip through a book of photographs by Cindy Sherman,” writes Farrow. “’Check it,’ she says as we arrive at Sherman’s Untitled #276, in which the artist poses as a kind of grungy Cinderella. ‘Lady Gaga completely ripped that off.’”). Still, Farrow doesn’t think she gets it.
“Cyrus is finding her taste in movies, too. She tells me she just watched the Tom Cruise 1990 drama Days of Thunder three nights in a row. She’s also newly enamored with the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. “I’m Blanche to a T, complete psycho,” she burbles cheerfully. I stare at her. I literally cannot imagine anyone less like Tennessee Williams’s fragile, lost Blanche DuBois. “Every time I watched her,” she goes on, “I was always like, ‘That’s me!’ ” If Cyrus is a Vivien Leigh performance, it’s Scarlett O’Hara in the early scenes of Gone With the Wind. She’s impetuous, beautiful, smarter than many give her credit for, slow to listen, quick to talk, adept at using her sexuality to her own ends.”
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“Oh,” I say, realising there’s been a misunderstanding. “Literal aliens.”
“Hey guys, if you’re ever interviewing Miley Cyrus, don’t bring up current affairs. I tried, and it’s like talking to your stoned housemate at 2am.” Sure, Farrow didn’t say that either, but c’mon, you can literally see his eyes roll as he transcribes the final portion of his interview.
“She’s loath even to join in the national conversation about the legalisation of marijuana, though pot has become a centerpiece of her image. “I love weed,” she tells me. “I just love getting stoned.” But she’s less interested in policy than in quality control. “I just want it to be back to where it’s, like, organic, good weed.”
Trying to engage her in other current events, I come up empty-handed. When she tells me that at Thanksgiving with the Cyrus clan her brothers “literally got in a fight over, like, aliens,” I ask, “Immigration?”
“Yes. So he’s just—”
“Where did the family land on that?” I ask.
“Well, my older brother is obsessed with all those documentaries that have been banned. My brother’s convinced it’s the government not wanting us to know about aliens because the world would just, like, freak out—”
“Oh,” I say, realizing there’s been a misunderstanding. “Literal aliens.”
“—and so my younger brother is like, ‘That’s completely bogus.’ ”
“Tell your brother I worked for the government and saw no aliens.”
“I’m not so sure,” she says, telling me she once saw suspicious lights in the sky in the Bahamas. “My dad told me it was a satellite. But the way it zipped off was really weird.”
“I think it was a satellite,” I offer.
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And that’s how you write a great celebrity profile with a feint air of casual condescension and intellectual superiority, and a knack for comedy. I know there are DNA tests for this kinda thing, but I think we just found definitive proof that this guy is really Woody Allen’s spawn.