Miley Cyrus Lost Major Film Role To Selena Gomez After Penis Cake Controversy

Yahoo

12-06-2025

Miley Cyrus has opened up about losing high-profile jobs over controversies earlier on in her career.
The Grammy winner is currently on the promo trail for her new album Something Beautiful, and recently sat down for an interview with Monica Lewinsky for her podcast Reclaiming.
During the conversation, Miley spoke about having her privacy violated from an early age, and how numerous leaked photos and videos cost her several big gigs.
'[There was] a bong video when I was 16, and that cost me a very large, multi-multi-million dollar Walmart deal,' she explained.
'I had to email the Walmart CEO an apology for being 16 and smoking weed… which most 16-year-olds do. But my email address at the time was 'Miley loves weed'... and it actually wasn't weed, it was Salvia, but I needed to write to him, 'I'm sorry for smoking weed'. And my mum was like, 'what the hell? What's your email? You have to change that!'.
'He was old, so I changed my email to 'Miley loves old people'. It didn't help very much, I still got fired. But these things that you know… to have adults firing a teenager for smoking pot, and you know when they were 16 or 17 they were smoking weed.
'The difference is, I didn't know I was being filmed. I might have known someone was filming and not cared because I was high on Salvia, but I didn't know that my camera would then get stolen at a teen party, because that's how it got leaked, my backpack got stolen at a party.'
Miley then reflected on another controversy from the first few years of her career, when TMZ published pictures of her celebrating then-boyfriend Liam Hemsworth's birthday with a penis-shaped cake.
'As a joke, I got my boyfriend a penis cake for his birthday,' she recalled. 'And I got fired. I was the lead actress in Hotel Transylvania, and they fired me, and replaced me, because I had made an inappropriate adult joke. But I was 18! So yes, I was fine to work in a kids' movie, but I [wasn't] a kid.'
Miley was replaced in the film by fellow Disney album Selena Gomez, who went on to return for three big-screen sequels.
'What felt ridiculous to me about getting fired [for] a penis cake is that they sell penis cakes for all bachelorettes. In Nashville, Tennessee, you can get penis cakes,' she quipped. 'It's not that big of a deal.
'So, I thought, 'this is a very simple, not vulgar, joke. This is silly, and you can do this for all bachelorette parties'... it felt ridiculous.
'To be fired for regular things that girls my age [do], but at that time, I wasn't someone that was appropriate for kids, even though that was my personal life. And that photo, again, only revealed itself because the camera had been stolen.'
Miley has been getting reflective throughout the promo cycle for her latest album.
In the last week, she made headlines when she revealed that Madonna was poised to mud-wrestle Miranda Kerr in one music video from her Bangerz era, before her record label stepped in, also making a surprising admission about another of her collaborators, Dua Lipa.
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