Miley Cyrus is still a few months away from the milestone 20th anniversary of “Lilly, Do You Want to Know a Secret,” the first episode of Hannah Montana. In the episode, which premiered on March 24, 2006, Miley Stewart’s best friend Lilly scores tickets to see the biggest pop star around — not knowing that she’s been the sensation getting on stage in a blonde wig for the past two years. Nearly two decades later, Cyrus is still keeping a few secrets, like what she has planned for the show’s anniversary.
“I want to design something really, really special for it because it really was the beginning of all of this that now sits here today,” Cyrus recently told SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio. “Without Hannah, there really wouldn’t be this kind of… this me.”
Cyrus fans have already let the excitement get the best of them. Some update accounts have started to post photoshopped emails that fabricate invitations to an anniversary collaboration with Spotify and Apple Music in a contrived effort to drive up streams on her latest album, Something Beautiful. The singer hasn’t revealed anything as of yet, but recently affirmed that she still has no desire to tour, so that more than likely won’t be in the plans, either.
For Cyrus, celebrating Hannah Montana is about embracing a part of her life she once thought she wanted to run away from. “It’s so crazy to think, too, that I started as a character that I thought was going to be impossible to shed,” she said. “And now that’s something that when I walk into a space, it’s looked at as this sense of nostalgia or something that you have from your childhood, but I’ve now been as kind of integrated into everyone’s life as the character itself. So that’s exciting to get to celebrate that.”
The impact of Hannah Montana is plastered all over pop. In 2020, Sabrina Carpenter recalled “watching the pilot and being like ‘I want to do that. I want to sing, and I want to act, and I want to dance. I want to do all those things.’” Carpenter, along with Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo, are part of what Rolling Stone described as the Hannah Montana Generation, “young artists who are not just evoking the frilly and bold aesthetic and unapologetically sugary sweet music of the show but also the type of larger-than-life persona Montana had in comparison to ‘real-life’ Stewart.”
In 2016, Cyrus commemorated the 10th anniversary of the series with a lengthy post on Instagram. “To the world it’s a celebration of 10 years, but for us the journey began way before the world had any clue who the fuck any of us are,” she wrote. “Even though I feel disconnected to who I was at that time I will always feel eternally grateful for the opportunity and platform I was given … Even though HM is chopped up into little tiny pieces and buried in my backyard she will always hold a very special place in my heart! Celebrate this day with us! Get real drunk and remember #HM4EVR.”
