Miley Cyrus: I'm Not a 'Sex Freak,' It's Just a Character I Play

Miley Cyrus may be having second thoughts about her public sexual shenanigans in 2013.

The singer, once known as the squeaky-clean Hannah Montana on The Disney Channel’s show of the same name, shed that image–and most of her clothes–this year with a series of highly sexual performances. Her twerk-heavy appearance on the VMAs made her pop culture’s It Girl, and she appeared to luxuriate in the tabloid glow.

She boasted to the press her performance “made history.”

Now, Cyrus is singing a different tune as 2013 comes to an end. She told The New York Times that her tongue-wagging and buttocks gyrating is part of a character she plays in public.

I went from people just thinking I was, like, a baby to people thinking I’m this, like, sex freak that really just pops molly and does lines all day. It’s like, ‘Has anyone ever heard of rock ‘n’ roll?” she said. “There’s a sex scene in pretty much every single movie, and they go, ‘Well, that’s a character.’ Well, that’s a character. I don’t really dress as a teddy bear and, like, twerk on Robin Thicke, you know?

Cyrus later says she doesn’t want to coax young people to try drugs.

I never want to be that person that’s, like, talking to 16- and 17-year-olds and being like, ‘Smoke weed.

Yet Cyrus lit up what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette while accepting an award at the MTV Europe Music Awards in November. She also inserted the drug Molly into two recent songs in a way that hardly discouraged impressionable people from using it. Surely she must realize some of her current fan base is in their teens and might be influenced by such actions.