How Did Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth Meet?
For many people, The Last Song was just another Nicholas Sparks movie adaptation, the one that starred Hannah Montana. It did fairly well when it came out, but it was certainly not The Notebook.
For Hannah, a.k.a. Miley Cyrus, and her husband Liam Hemsworth, however, The Last Song was really a first — as in the first time they met. Not many couples can tie their meeting to a sudsy Hollywood romance, but this couple can and their story in itself is like something straight out of Sparks’ pen: Love gained, love lost, then found again.
Cyrus and Hemsworth first find each other
There have been 11 Nicholas Sparks movies, and The Last Song was the sixth of these, arriving in 2010, just a month after Dear John with Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum. Cyrus plays a rebellious girl sent to a Southern beach town for the summer to stay with her estranged father (Greg Kinnear), and Hemsworth plays her main love interest.
It wasn’t Cyrus’ first movie, but it was one of the first vehicles to set her apart from Disney queen Hannah Montana. This made her a veteran compared to Hemsworth, who was a total unknown at the time. His brother Chris had only just made his first appearance in a big franchise movie, the 2009 Star Trek, where he played Captain Kirk’s father.
Cyrus and Hemsworth hit it off, even to the point of working in an unscripted kiss. Cyrus told Collider, “With Nicholas Sparks writing this, I said, ‘I like animals. I like music. I like hot Australians.’…It worked out fine, and I owe Nicholas, big time.”
Liam would go on to find his own fame a few years later as Gale in The Hunger Games. The couple got engaged when Cyrus was only 19 and Hemsworth was 22.
Cyrus and Hemsworth break up and make up
By 2013, however, the pair had called off their engagement, splitting up almost as quickly as they had gotten together.
“I don’t think I realized what 19 truly is, and I got engaged at 19, and I definitely wouldn’t change being engaged. It was so fun wearing a fat rock for a few years,” Cyrus said to Barbara Walters.
Maybe Nicolas Sparks couples just aren’t fated to say together.
But there are always exceptions. Three years passed, and Cyrus went to a music festival in Hemsworth’s native Australia, and before you could say Safe Haven the couple were back together again.
“At the time we were going in different directions, and it’s just what needed to happen. We were both super young, and it was a good decision at the time—we both needed that,” Cyrus told GQ.
The couple finally tied the knot in late 2018 in a private ceremony. When the couple posted photos of their wedding, it caught a certain romance novelist’s attention.
Cyrus responded with three hearts. Hemsworth later appeared on Live with Kelly and Ryan, saying his wife’s name was “Miley Ray Hemsworth now, actually,” adding, “She will still be obviously known as Miley Cyrus, but she took my name, which is great.”
Cyrus is keeping busy on both the acting and musical fronts. Her next album, My Name is Miley Cyrus, is being released as three six-song EPs throughout this year: She is Coming on May 31, She Is Here in the summer and She is Everything in the fall. She also appeared on an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror that dropped June 5.
Most recently Hemsworth appeared as an exaggeratedly suave leading man in Isn’t It Romantic opposite Rebel Wilson, who suddenly finds her life has become a cliched romantic comedy.
