Miley Cyrus Says A Dirty Birthday Joke Got Her Fired From Adam Sandler's 'Hotel Transylvania'

I vant to suck your…. “blood.”  

Throughout pop-culture history, audiences and entertainment companies alike have repeatedly proven themselves unable to handle a female former child star’s maturation into adulthood without acting like either creepy predators or prudish pearl-clutchers. Miley Cyrus, previously and never again known as Hannah Montana, knows that dichotomy all too well, as her own rebrand from Disney Channel sensation to twerking adult pop star sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry in the early 2010s and sparked the strangest reactions from adult entertainment executives and culture critics.  

But Cyrus’ ban from the Disney multimedia empire isn’t the only time when the adult actor/singer who is no longer a child got kicked out of a kids’ entertainment project for doing adult things that are completely legal. Cyrus, who recently appeared on the podcast Hotel Transylvania, but Sony Pictures kicked her off the film when she gave her then-boyfriend Liam Hemsworth a penis-shaped cake for his birthday and posed with it provocatively in leaked photos that were stolen from her personal camera.  

Sony is just lucky that Cyrus didn’t go even further with the icing.  

While running through the long list of ways that the entertainment industry screwed her over after she dared to turn 18, Cyrus recalled, “I, as a joke, got my boyfriend a penis cake for his birthday, 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!” Cyrus said of the viral cake photos that led to her unceremonious exit from what would become a massive animated movie franchise. “So yes, I was fine to work in a kids’ movie, but I’m not a kid!” 

Sony Pictures then gave the role to another grown-up Disney Channel star, Selena Gomez, who would go on to release the pop single “Fetish” one year before the release of Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.

And while the hypocrisy and policing of adult women’s perfectly normal and legal behavior may be abhorrent, Cyrus believes that young women growing up in the entertainment industry today will have an easier time expressing themselves without losing work. “I don’t know if we put our Disney kids on the pedestal the way that we used to,” Cyrus posited. “But I was, at that time, someone that wasn’t appropriate for kids, even though that was in my personal life.”

Ultimately, however, it’s up to Sony Pictures if they want to fire an adult actress for making dirty jokes in her free time, as they obviously had to protect the squeaky-clean, family-friendly image of the cast from their kids’ film. After all, it's not like the male lead of Hotel Transylvania had just released an R-rated comedy where the central joke of his character is that he was a celebrity statutory rape victim.