Billy Ray Cyrus Gushes Over Elizabeth Hurley

Billy Ray Cyrus can’t help but gush over the “impressively brilliant” Elizabeth Hurley.

A week after the “Achy Breaky Heart” singer 63, and Strictly Confidential actress, 59, debuted their relationship on social media, Cyrus gushed about their first meeting and well-timed reconnection.

The country singer and Hurley first met while filming 2022’s Christmas in Paradise not long after he separated from ex-wife Tish Cyrus. “We did a film two years ago down in the Caribbean and we did very few scenes together, but the couple times we were in the same scene,” Cyrus recalled on Thursday’s episode of Apple Music Country’s The Ty Bentli Show. “There was a chemistry there that [I] felt. We just laughed, and it was at a time [when] I wasn’t laughing a lot and I found out the oddest thing.”

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The Hannah Montana personality remembered thinking they “had way more in common than we had different” at the time, but the two lost touch for two years after filming together.

“Then two more years of life went by, and it was this evolution that some might’ve looked at and certainly I felt like, ‘Wow, can life get any harder? Can it get any tougher for me?’” he recalled. “At a certain point it was like, ‘You can’t get knocked down any flatter than laying on your back when life is kicking you in the gut.’”

It was then that Hurley reached out to him via text. “I didn’t even know the number, and it’s like, ‘Hey, it looks like life might be a little bit tough and just wanted you to know I’m in your corner. You got a friend in your corner,’” Cyrus recalled.

The Grammy winner said the message reminded him of a conversation he had with Johnny Cash in 1992. “Johnny said, ‘Hey, you know, just remember that all things that are good come from almighty God above and that stuff happens, and in your case… the good outweighs the bad. Let ‘em have it. I’m in your corner,’” Cyrus recalled.

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Hurley’s message reminded him “a bit of what Johnny had written me at my lowest point,” and Cyrus said the note from “this friend who made me laugh” came in “that second that maybe I needed most.”

“She’s so impressively brilliant. She reminds me a lot of Dolly Parton. She’s a very smart businesswoman,” he gushed, adding: “If you can laugh together, you can make it through everything.”

Asked if his connection with Hurley had turned into something that was now an “actual relationship,” Cyrus responded coyly, “I would say it feels very … she’s a great human being,” adding, “If all we ever were [are] the friends that we are [now], I would take that.”