It feels like it’s been about 20 years since Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth announced they were splitting up after just eight months of marriage (and many years together). In reality, that was just in August 2019, and the couple only finalized their divorce in January.
A source recently talked to Entertainment Tonight about how Cyrus currently feels about her ex-husband, and it seems like it’s all good vibes. “She knows how important love and marriage are for him [Hemsworth], but she just needed her independence,” the source said. “Miley and Liam have moved on and it seems they’re both where they most want to be in life.”
The source continued, “Miley has moved on; she feels free. She is happy and dating Cody at the moment with no pressure to marry. Miley and Cody are staying home and social distancing together. She keeps saying this has been the best thing for her.”
According to the source who spoke to ET, Hemsworth is doing just fine, too. “Liam loved Miley so much but in the back of his mind, he always knew a life with her would prove difficult because she never seemed ready to settle down,” they said. “Liam wanted a marriage and family.”
The source added, “While Liam’s family has been a huge support since the breakup with Miley, it was Gabriella who made him realize there is life after Miley. Gabriella is quiet, low key. She loves to be alone with Liam and isn’t seeking attention from others.”
This sounds very much like an all’s well that ends well situation, and we’re just happy if Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth are, too.
No, the Most Dangerous Game actor didn’t mention Cyrus by name, but he did explain how he’s found “balance” over the last sixth months, which presumably included some divorce-related hardships. “This last six months, honestly, for keeping my head level and just staying balanced, I’d say exercise has been big for me,” he told the magazine. When asked if his focus is currently on “rebuilding” in light of the trials of his last decade, he said, “Rebuilding? Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.”
This will probably be the most Liam Hemsworth ever says about the situation. When he and Cyrus confirmed their split in August 2019, he only released one, very general statement about it.
“Hi, all. Just a quick note to say that Miley and I have recently separated, and I wish her nothing but health and happiness going forward,” he wrote on Instagram. “This is a private matter and I have not made, nor will I be making, any comments to any journalists or media outlets. Any reported quotes attributed to me are false. Peace and Love.”
Cyrus, meanwhile, has been a bit more vocal—particularly about the rumors she cheated on Hemsworth. She took to Twitter in August 2019 and immediately shut that down.
“I’m not perfect, I don’t want to be, it’s boring,” she wrote. “I’ve grown up in front of you, but the bottom line is, I HAVE GROWN UP. I can admit to a lot of things but I refuse to admit that my marriage ended because of cheating. Liam and I have been together for a decade. I’ve said it before & it remains true, I love Liam and always will.”
On Sunday, The Sunday Times shared an in-depth interview with Orlando Bloom, where he went deep on his personal life, including his decision to go celibate just before meeting his now fiance, Katy Perry.
“I wasn’t happy,” the 43-year-old actor, who split from supermodel Miranda Kerr in 2013, shared with the newspaper. Thankfully, his friend, professional surfer Laird Hamilton, offered some words of advice. “Laird said, ‘If you want to be serious about a relationship, go celibate for a few months and figure it out.”
“It takes away the idea of going to a party and thinking, ‘Who am I going to meet?’ I was suddenly, like, ‘Oh, I can have a relationship with a woman that is just friends,'” Bloom added.
In the interview, Bloom revealed that he never felt as though he had ever developed a true friendship with women because sex was always a part of the equation. “I was going to do three months,” Bloom said of his original plan, “but I was really enjoying the way I was relating to women, and to the feminine within myself.”
Yes, for those of you who were wondering, Bloom’s celibacy also included abstaining from masturbation. “It was insane. I don’t think it’s healthy,” he said. “I don’t think it was advisable. You have to keep it moving down there.”
Some six months into his celibacy stint, Bloom met Perry and, as you know, the rest is history. The pair announced their engagement in 2019, and just a few weeks ago, Perry revealed she is pregnant with their first child together in the music video for her song, Never Worn White.
“This kind of joy isn’t something you can put into words—or really wrap your head around. Obviously, we’ve known for a long time before going public. As you can imagine, it’s such an incredibly precious, private, yet commonplace moment to be sharing with the world,” Bloom said of the pregnancy. “The whole family is over the moon.”
In January, word spread of a new virus known as “SARS-CoV-2” was causing a disease named “coronavirus disease 2019.” The virus quickly jumped from nation to nation, shutting down many aspects of life as we know it along the way. Now, most of the world is being asked to socially isolate from their friends and extended family to stop the spread. And that means spending an awful lot of time at home.
Thankfully, Disney Plus is picking up the entertainment slack. On Saturday, March 15, the company announced plans to stream Frozen 2 a full three months early to bring “families with some fun and joy during this challenging time.”
“Frozen 2 has captivated audiences around the world through its powerful themes of perseverance and the importance of family, messages that are incredibly relevant during this time, and we are pleased to be able to share this heartwarming story early with our Disney+ subscribers to enjoy at home on any device,” Disney CEO Bob Chapek shared in a statement.
According to the announcement, the movie will be available starting today, Sunday, March 15.
And Chapek wasn’t the only one who was excited to share the news.
Actress Kristen Bell, who voices Anna in the film, shared a screenshot of the film on Instagram along with the caption, “Your sisters will be here for you during crazy time! Surprise! #Frozen2 is coming early to #DisneyPlus. Start streaming this Sunday.”
Of course, nothing is really this altruistic. As The Verge noted, executives at Disney Plus likely saw an opportunity to bring on more subscribers as schools shut down and more and more people are working from home. But hey, who cares, as long as we get to enjoy something that brings us joy for a moment, right?
This does, however, also beg the question of what else may be released early due to coronavirus. On Friday, journalist Evan Ross Katz asked Bravo’s Andy Cohen if he’d consider releasing The Real Housewives of New York just a bit early, to which Cohen replied, “It’s on the table, but complicated.”
Kate Middleton at a Family Action engagement in 2019. Mark Cuthbert/Getty Images
Kate Middleton in Bletchley, England in May 2019. Karwai Tang/Getty Images
The likely reason is that it’s simply a personal preference. Middleton talks often about how much she values her time outside in the country with her children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis—and as a busy mom, it’s much easier to rebuff a nail than it is to re-polish. Not that we’d expect her to show up in neon or nail art, but the queen reportedly prefers pale shades to adorn female royals’ nails.
So we turned our question over to royal style expert Myka Meier: Could there be any deeper meaning behind the change? “There is no official royal protocol that says what the royal family must wear or even what products they should use,” she tells Glamour. “Each senior royal is trusted to make their style and grooming choices, including products they wish to use. While we have seen the Duchess of Cambridge wearing light pink colored or even clear polish in the past, one of her favorite new looks in recent years has actually been no polish at all! Instead she has simply opted for a buffed nail with a naturally squared low-maintenance shape, which not only goes with everything she wears but looks clean-cut, natural, and gorgeous.”
Another thought? You can’t be publicly criticized for a shade you’re not wearing. We certainly loved when Meghan Markle wore a dark polish shade for the British Fashion Awards in 2018, but there were many who did not—and used it as yet another reason to show their dislike for the Duchess of Sussex online.
So, are bare nails about to be the big new trend for spring 2020 thanks to a royal nod of approval? We shall see.
As expected, I only found about 10 emails between us in as many years of Gmail use. The revelation was not in anything I read but in the mere typing of his name—an icy wave of relief splashing me in the face. How good it felt to write his name for no reason, in a place that only I could see, and not on some piece of paperwork related to his death or in response to some well-wisher’s post on Facebook. It was like charging a magical sigil. I’d never been one of those writers who attached fetishistic significance to the physical act of writing (or to books themselves, or paper). But I finally understood how those writers felt. Writing to my father, I realized, was a charmed act. It didn’t summon him, but it raised the friendly shadow of him in the room; that was something.
I began writing him emails. I didn’t send them at first. Typing his email address into the “recipient” bar was enough to conjure up his listening presence. For months I transcribed the hostile anguish in my head into emails to my father, which I would then seal off with the addition of his email address and save in my drafts folder. It was the high school diary, unfiltered. He would never find out how it ended now; it felt good to “tell” him.
The first time I pressed “send,” it was by accident, and I was horrified. I was worried not that someone would receive and read the email, but that the recipient address would bounce back a message that the account had been deactivated.
I stared at my inbox for a minute, waiting for the inevitable. It never happened. The email address was still active.
So I continued the ritual, except now I sent those long-winded emails out. I wrote to my father anytime I needed him. In my letters, I tried to talk myself around to whatever he would have said to me, hoping I could reverse-engineer the advice he might have given me. Then I pressed “send,” which never stopped being thrilling—I’d sidestepped the finality of death and found a plane where my father could thrive unchallenged. I put disclaimers at the beginning of every email: Hey, if you can somehow read this, please ignore it; hey, I don’t think anyone’s checking this email, but if you are then please just delete without reading; I’m lonely, I’m grieving, I miss my father, nothing to see here. But nobody ever responded.
One day, a year and a half later, someone did respond—not from my father’s email address, thank God, or I likely would have passed out at my desk. Still, it was frightening to see another email address from the same Workplace suite, with the same subject line. I don’t know what I was frightened of, exactly. Only that the stakes felt terribly high. I’d forgotten the cardinal rule of doing anything online, even sending emails to a dead person’s inbox—everything that happens online can be witnessed by an audience.
The response I received is the reason you’re reading this, because I posted it on Twitter and it went viral. “I’m sure you remember me,” my father’s former coworker wrote. “I want you to know that I never read these emails because I can tell they are very personal. But I do see them coming in and I can see that you must still miss your dad terribly.” There was more; I’m self-conscious about typing it all out, because of how generous it was for this person to not only share memories of my father with me, but to interpret them, color them with our shared understanding of what my father and I had been together. Like, for example: “Watching the two of you together wisecracking…it was like watching a Mel Brooks movie.”
Right after he died, all I ever wanted to do was talk about how great my dad was. People never quite related to that urge properly, leaving me feeling frustrated and thwarted at every turn. I was so dialed into my grief that it was unimaginable to me how people could talk to me about anything else. I wanted other people to tell me funny stories that made my father sound as cool and charming as I’d always believed him to be, without my having to ask for it. That was the thing that my dad’s old coworker did for me. I shot the signals of my mourning into space for months, fully expecting them to die unreceived. And when I least expected it, someone sent signals back that said, “You are not the last living witness to the relationship you had with your father.”
