NOTHING BREAKS LIKE MILEY’S HEART
THE GREY’S ANATOMY ACTRESS, 51, ON SCARING OFF FANS, DISASTERS ON ZOOM AND WHY BRIDGERTON IS BEST WATCHED ALONE
IT WAS more like super-blub than Super Bowl for Miley Cyrus as she broke down in tears on stage.
The pain of her divorce from Liam Hemsworth flew in like a Wrecking Ball as she performed the 2013 hit at her TikTok Tailgate pre-show for Super Bowl LV on Sunday.
Miley – who split from the Aussie hunk in 2019, after eight months of marriage – cracked as she sang the line: ‘Don’t you ever think, I just walked away, I will always want you.’
She attempted to pick up the chorus, ‘I came in...’ before telling the audience why she was so emotional. The song was about the end of a relationship and, wiping away tears, the pop rebel,
28, said: ‘Singing that song Wrecking Ball, about feeling completely broken and shattered... everyone’s suffering is different.
‘I wear a lot of glitter and a lot of armour, and I also wear r my heart on my sleeve, and it t gets broken a lot.’
Elsewhere, Miley honoured her godmother Dolly Parton with a cover of Jolene and was joined on stage in Florida by Billy Idol and Joan Jett during her performance for front-line health workers.
Emotional Wrecking: Miley broke down during her Super Bowl set
The government is suggesting the school year should be extended by two weeks to help children catch up.
On the surface this might seem like a good idea, and I’m sure most teachers would just sigh and get on with it.
But if you are ‘that person’ who thinks teaching stops when the kids go home or that teachers have had it easy with fewer kids in their classes, think again and instead have some sympathy for how tired some teachers are right now.
Teaching involves huge amounts of planning, preparation, support and assessment. Take a moment to imagine how much extra work has had to be put in to plan lessons for key workers’ children, who are present in school, while simultaneously planning, preparing, distributing, collecting and assessing a different set of work for children at home – all of whom learn at different levels of ability, meaning work has to be tailored to each individual child.
I can’t imagine this level of workload amid the underlying stress of wondering whether the child you are supporting might be an unwitting carrier of a disease that could kill you.
So I just want to say to teachers, hang on in there. You deserve that holiday when it eventually comes.
Bev Bruce, Kent
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that it is imperative to always have a fully funded and resourced public healthcare system. It is a case of all or nothing.
The British people understand this but will the present and future governments of the UK actually take heed?
Phil Brand, London
Let’s be honest, this isn’t a true lockdown. I go to work as an essential worker in telecommunications. The District line is always packed between Dagenham and London. Sometimes it’s standing room only.
It’s time to mix it up, for all our sakes and sanity. Close the building sites and allow some hospitality back into our lives.
As far as I see it there’s never going to be the perfect set of conditions. Who are we trying to fool here? You can’t be scaremongering yet sending me to work on packed trains.
Mike, Dagenham
How do we know what to believe regarding the number of Covid deaths and comparisons with other countries?
People have complained that loved ones have been recorded as ‘death by Covid’ even though there was no mention of Covid up until the day before death. We seem to record all deaths – hospital, care home, homes etc – while other countries seem to report hospital deaths only. And who can trust some of the more dubious countries?
Levels of population, geographical location (whether they are airport hubs, for example) all contribute to the picture. Cultural differences and attitudes don’t help, either. Some countries are more totalitarian and some have a greater sense of community.
We have a greater sense of self, self and self – we have a right, we are entitled, we can do what we want.
AG, Cleveland
Peter says some of us will get freaked out when we come out of lockdown and have to get used to other people being up close and in our personal space again (MetroTalk, Mon).
He says it will happen on the train but what about being in other places like pubs and restaurants? How are we going to make people feel safe to be with other people again?
Julie, Bath
As Jayne Sillitoe states in her letter (MetroTalk, Mon), children are big spreaders of the virus. Why, then, have they been allowed to run around supermarkets without wearing masks for all this time? It must have been putting staff and customers at risk for a long time now. Surely any child over the age of five is capable of wearing one?
Carol, Chester
I believe most would agree that in the future we should not only remember and honour the inspirational Captain Sir Tom Moore but also the countless thousands of local heroes in the NHS, public transport, police, shop workers and the many, many others who basically do their best for their fellow countrymen.
These local heroes go to work every day knowing they are increasing their own chances of contracting the disease. A great number of them have done so and have sadly died.
These selfless heroes keep the country going with some kind of normality – people are fed, bins are emptied, doctors treat patients and much more is going on as normal.
They do it with no thought of race, creed or colour. For the devotion and sacrifice these heroes make, and in memory of the thousands who died before their time, it would be a wonderful idea to take one day every year to honour and remember them. And what better day to do this than every February 2, the date of Sir Tom Moore’s death?
Let’s make it a national day of brotherhood and unity, a day to remember the time when we were all equal under Covid.
Have you learned any new skills during lockdown?
My daughter learned how to do nails [shows off manicure to the camera] so I finally get to have nails! That’s how you know I haven’t been to work because Bailey doesn’t have nails. Mostly, I’ve been spending as much virtual time as I can with family and friends.
Did the cast of Grey’s Anatomy stay in touch?
We took a big break for a minute! We were doing show after show and we all needed to sit down. Later, we started making sure everyone was OK. I don’t think anyone has mastered the art of entering a Zoom room smoothly. Either the camera is not on or the mute is on or the angle is crazy or you’re looking up someone’s nose. You’ve got
30 people on screen and it’s hard to see them because everyone looks so weird.
Season 17 shows Covid hitting the hospital. Was it hard to film while all this was going on in real life?
What’s going on in the world is giving us honest content to portray and the opportunity to honour our healthcare professionals and tell their stories – that’s what is driving this season.
Bailey is so fierce. Do people get intimidated by you when they see you at the supermarket?
I think so! A lot of the time people don’t come up to me because they know how Bailey would react. I get a lot of double takes because people think, ‘Why would she be in this store? It must be somebody else.’ Because of the pandemic and everybody wearing masks, I thought it would be easier to move around while everyone is unrecognisable. It hadn’t occurred to me that people see me in masks all the time so everyone was like, ‘That’s Dr Bailey!’
What would you like to see happen in Bailey’s future?
I’ve never gone into the writer’s room to give input about her story. Every single read, I sit down and see what they’ve come up with and it’s always something challenging – it’s always a direction I’d never thought about. And then I realise, ‘OK, they don’t need me!’ They need me to bring these pages to life and for seven seasons it’s worked very well.
With Grey’s Anatomy coming to Disney+, plenty of us will be bingeing it for the first time. What should we look out for?
The exciting part of watching Grey’s from the beginning is that usually there will be someone around you that has seen all these episodes so you’ll have them going, ‘Oh, you’re at that part? Wait until you get to…’ In every season we have many episodes where you find out what happens in these characters’ lives, who passes away unexpectedly, what kind of accidents happen. Once you’ve started, you can’t watch it with someone who has already seen it because they’ll just give it away.
You’re a director too. Do you prefer being in front of the camera or behind it?
My first love is being an actor. Being a director has made me appreciate what it takes to put a show together. It’s made me a better actor because I’m more conscious of what you need to do in front of the camera for the director to get the shot they want. When you’re making a TV show, everything carries the same level of importance, from the acting and the directing to the set design and the costumes.
Shonda Rhimes is a powerhouse - she’s done Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Bridgerton. Why are her shows so successful?
The shows that come out of Shondaland have a very young feel – they feel current and familiar to our audience. That makes them fall in love with those characters and invest in their stories.
I’m probably the last person in Shondaland that has not jumped on to social media
Bridgerton set pulses racing. Did it get you hot under the collar?
I watched all of it on Christmas Day. I binged it all with my daughter, though, which I probably shouldn’t have. But once we started the first episode we went all the way through to the end.
You started on stage very young. Would you go back?
Oh, certainly. I started out in musical theatre when I was five years old and I immediately fell in love with audience reaction. I felt like we were providing [the audience] with an escape from whatever it was they were going through outside the theatre for those two hours.
Speaking of audience reaction, do you like hearing what viewers say on social media?
At the beginning I used to rely on the fan mail but now I’m probably the last person in Shondaland that has not jumped on to social media. So I just get all the comments about the show passed on to me by everybody else. It’s an important tool but sometimes you hear negative things about yourself and your character. I would rather not know that!
Grey’s Anatomy will be available to stream on Star on Disney+ from February 23