Miley Cyrus couldn’t help but make googly eyes at Ariana Grande during their 2015 duet for the Happy Hippie: Backyard Sessions. According to the former Hannah Montana star, she was “flirting” hard with the singer at the time — which may have left her “a little scared.”
Cyrus looked back on the moment on Part 34 of her “Used to Be Young” TikTok series, which was posted to her page earlier today. In the video from eight years ago, the two women wore animal-themed onesies and performed a cover of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House.
“This is as serious as it can be — me and Ariana Grande in onesies performing in the backyard,” Cyrus said. “I was flirting with her and she was a little scared. We were having fun!”
The ex-Disney Channel star — who later joined Grande for a duet at her One Love Manchester benefit concert after the Manchester Arena bombing — went on to praise her friendship with the “Thank U, Next” songstress.
“Ariana’s a real friend,” she said. “There’s never been a time where I’ve asked her to do something that was important to me that she didn’t come through and same thing for me with her.”
In 2015, Cyrus launched the second iteration of her Backyard Sessions to help promote Happy Hippie, the non-profit she founded that focuses on youth homelessness. In 2014, the star used her platform to bring focus to the issue when she asked a young homeless man to accept the VMA for Video of the Year on her behalf.
According to a recent TikTok Cyrus posted, she decided to forfeit her acceptance speech after seeing a video of Marlon Brando giving up his Oscar in 1973 to “highlight some activism that was important to him.”
“I started my own foundation, Happy Hippie, because I didn’t think that it made sense for there to be so much homelessness, especially with young people,” Cyrus explained. “And we’re having nights like the VMAs where people are in black cars and diamonds and designer clothes and all celebrating each other like we had done something that actually mattered.”
She continued, “It felt like Jesse’s voice would have been much more impactful to give him my one minute on stage and let him have the mic and him take the platform to highlight an issue that was really important to me because it was happening right in my area.”