Billy Ray: Last News

Miley Cyrus is taking some big steps with beau Maxx Morando!

In 2011, Billy Ray Cyrus infamously blamed Hannah Montana for wrecking his marriage, telling GQ it “destroyed my family.” Well, his former better half is here to tell y’all, that ain’t the case!

Tish Cyrus opened up about the Cyrus family’s experience when Miley and Billy Ray were starring in Hannah Montana.

(allegedly), possibly , and . But sadly, for the last decade or so, Cyrus's tiffs haven't been the fun intra-celebrity kind, but the personal, family kind. It seems the Cyruses are feuding amongst themselves.

Following the success of Air, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are reuniting again on the kidnapping thriller Animals, with Damon starring and Affleck directing. Connor McIntyre penned the script with revisions by Billy Ray. The film will be produced by Affleck, Damon and Dani Bernfeld of Artists Equity and Brad Weston and Collin Creighton of MakeReady, who developed the project in partnership with Fifth Season.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are teaming up once again for “Animals,” a new crime thriller that Netflix has just acquired.

After launching the Strike Talk podcast with producer Todd Garner to give WGA strikers comfort in the early days of 2023’s labor unrest, Billy Ray is signing off. When you are an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and a director and producer to boot, you’ve got to go back to work at some point. No one expected it to go 30 weeks, but Ray threw himself into each installment, from landing guests who demystified the process, and down to its editing. It’s as if he was making a weekly series episode or a movie. It was all for his love for fellow practitioners of the writing craft, and his need to sound an alarm on how a failed negotiation over wages, AI and the shrinking of writer rooms would endanger an ecosystem that has fueled brilliant writing on series and films for decades. Here, he teams with Deadline co-editor Mike Fleming Jr. to discuss what might happen going forward, with mergers still reshaping the Hollywood landscape, and a battle brewing just up the road with IATSE and Teamsters as their deals expire this summer. Deadline offers gratitude to Ray, and to Garner, for their selfless dedication to making this such a great ride.

For a Friday that is time for reflection and giving thanks, host Billy Ray and returning original host Todd Garner welcomes WGA president Meredith Stiehm and SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher. They talk with the guys about the lessons learned from the long and brutal six month strike that is finally and mercifully over. The guild leaders advise IATSE and Teamsters negotiators what to expect when their deals expire next July. They also review a negotiation that in their minds never had to turn into such a protracted process. The gains made by their guilds could have been achieved if only the signatories had sent in the CEOs earlier to the bargaining table, and stopped trying to work from a contract and negotiating moves that were hopelessly outdated in the streaming age. Coming in for particular criticism here is AMPTP negotiator Carol Lombardini. After Billy Ray recalled watching Lombardini cancel catering and then announce that the WGA walked away from the table in 2017, Stiehm said this time the head negotiator for studios responded to rejection of an offer by the WGA negotiating committee by presenting the contract to membership and releasing the full offer to the media. Ray and Garner will do one more Strike Talk by the way, and to the editors, that is another thing to give thanks for.

EXCLUSIVE: Buchwald has signed Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate Billy Ray Cyrus and Firerose Cyrus for worldwide representation in all areas. 

Deadline Strike Talk is taking off today, for the first time in 28 weeks. Filmmaker Billy Ray will reunite with producer Todd Garner for the 29th and final installment of a program that each week covered the painful clashes between the signatories and the WGA and SAG-AFTRA with an insight honed by Ray’s experience as a member of the negotiating committee on the WGA team through several contract negotiations. Strike Talk has been quite a ride for all of us at Deadline. We will have a grand final installment day after Thanksgiving, when there will be plenty to be thankful for.

So the good news is that the half year double strike that ground Hollywood to a halt is over. The bad news is Billy Ray has just about come to the end of the road on Deadline Strike Talk, which to our mind has been superb and a light in the darkness. He will do one more episode or two to wrap up the lessons we hopefully learned from this labor discord, and then we will beg him to keep a podcast presence with Deadline. In sober and intelligent tones, and with a superb roster of guests, he has helped create an understanding of the intricacies, forces and history that went into the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. The hope is he, and his initial co-pilot Todd Garner, will want to continue together or separately an inside baseball dialogue with the industry that Deadline serves. That is a conversation for another day. Here, Billy Ray discusses the settlement that puts the industry back to work. And he is joined by California State Senators Anthony Portantino and Dave Min to discuss the role of state government in supporting the labor movement.

In his 27th installment of Deadline Strike Talk, Billy Ray leans into the need for labor and studios to realize they must be partners willing to compromise, for this business to get past the strikes and rebound in the coming years. To illustrate the need to be changeable, Ray harkens back to his own 2003 directorial debut, Shattered Glass. He catches up with three vital collaborators who made invaluable contributions to the celebrated film — Mandy Walker, Jeff Ford, and Adam Merims — to discuss what has happened to our business since.

In the 26th episode of Deadline Strike Talk — which for below the liners signifies half a year without a paycheck that hasn’t come from Uber fares or waiting tables — host Billy Ray hits on a zeitgeist theme that gets voiced a lot by people who just feel that the business isn’t as remotely as exciting or near as much fun as it was before the folly that signatories put themselves into by chasing Netflix as it became the preeminent streamer. The result has put just about every other streamer pursuit in a position of being money losers that have strained the economics, and accelerated the demise of those conglomerates’ traditional networks, and so many other things.

Billy Ray Cyrus and Firerose are revealing how they met!

Week 25 of Deadline’s Strike Talk podcast comes amid a tough time on the negotiations front between SAG-AFTRA and the studios. No formal talks have taken place or have even been scheduled since October 11, when bargaining was suspended amid the latest impasse.

Miley Cyrus comes from a very famous family. However, like many other families, they seem to have their ups and downs. Currently, a Cyrus family feud is said to be tearing the brood apart.

In the 24th weekly installment of the Deadline Strike Talk Podcast, host Billy Ray doesn’t seem too shaken by the surprise breakoff of talks between the studios and SAG-AFTRA.

Billy Ray Cyrus is officially a married man again. The 62-year-old said “I do” for the second time on Tuesday, October 10th, tying the knot with 34-year-old Australian singer Firerose.

Billy Ray Cyrus is married!

As the Hollywood strikes stretched to Week 23, optimism is high that a deal between signatories and SAG-AFTRA is close and the town can go back to work. That enthusiasm could be felt with all the deal stories that Deadline broke this week, a clear signal of hope.

Caroline Brew editor Special agent-turned-producer Anne Beagan was immortalized on the iconic wall at the Beverly Hills Palm at a celebration for the broadcast premiere of Paramount+ docuseries, “FBI True.” Beagan is the executive producer and co-creator of “FBI True,” a docuseries which takes viewers into some of the most significant cases in FBI history through the perspective of the agents who were there. The series has aired for three seasons on Paramount+, and this week, made its linear debut on CBS where it will air on Tuesday nights on the network’s strike-impacted fall schedule.