Billy Ray Cyrus is finally putting some context around one of 2025’s most unexpected celebrity pairings: his relationship with Elizabeth Hurley. After the couple sparked headlines with a playful Easter Instagram photo in April, Cyrus has started sharing how it moved from a work connection into something real and why he’s describing it as a rare bright spot in a rough stretch of his life.
Cyrus and Hurley first crossed paths while making the 2022 holiday film Christmas in Paradise, which was shot in Nevis. Their roles didn’t require them to spend a ton of time together on camera, but Cyrus says the personal chemistry was there anyway — particularly the ease of making each other laugh. In his telling, that laughter mattered because he wasn’t in a particularly good place at the time, and it stuck with him as something different from the usual small-talk, surface-level Hollywood friendliness.
After filming wrapped, they didn’t stay in close contact. What changed wasn’t a grand romantic gesture — it was a message that landed when Cyrus says he was getting “knocked down” by life. In an interview excerpt tied to Apple Music Country’s The Ty Bentli Show, Cyrus recalls Hurley reaching out with a supportive text letting him know she was “in his corner.” That simple check-in reopened the line between them, and what followed was a reconnection that built gradually rather than exploding into a sudden public romance.
That slower pace is part of why Cyrus frames the relationship less like a “new celebrity couple” rollout and more like a friendship that turned into something deeper. He’s been careful not to oversell it with dramatic promises or big future talk, emphasizing instead that it’s been “beautiful” and that he’s not putting heavy expectations on where it has to go. In the same breath, he’s also made it clear the relationship isn’t only about Hurley; he’s spoken warmly about her son, Damian, saying he cares about him a lot, which signals this isn’t being treated as a casual fling on his end.
Hurley, for her part, has publicly matched that tone: happy, grounded, and not pretending distance and schedules don’t exist. She’s said they’re happy even while managing time in different countries, and outlets reporting on the couple have pointed to the surprisingly obvious overlap in what they enjoy, countryside life, nature, and family, which helps explain why the pairing works on a day-to-day level beyond the initial “wait, those two?” reaction.
The public first got a real look at them together on April 20, 2025 (Easter Sunday), when Hurley posted the now-viral photo of Cyrus kissing her cheek during what looked like a farm visit. That single image did what celebrity soft-launches always do: it instantly turned a private reconnection into a public storyline, with fans trying to reverse-engineer timelines and motives.
Cyrus’s explanation cuts through some of the noise: it wasn’t a PR-engineered romance or a sudden impulse. It was an old connection that resurfaced at the right moment, sparked by kindness and maintained by genuine compatibility, plus, crucially for him, laughter. Whether this turns into a long-term partnership or not, he’s describing it as something that’s brought him real happiness and steadiness, and he’s not pretending that’s a small thing.
