Elizabeth Hurley is opening up about merging her family with boyfriend Billy Ray Cyrus’ brood.
“Well, it works very well, I think,” Hurley, 61, said on the Friday, October 23, episode of the “Off Air with Jane & Fi” podcast of their blended family. “When I dated a previous boyfriend of mine, Shane [Warne] — who sadly, of course, isn’t with us anymore — he had three kids and they were all sort of the same age as Damian and then a few years above, but they were kids.”
She continued, “They were at school. There were still school runs, school holidays. There was an awful lot to juggle. And now, Billy and I are empty nesters. All our children are independent and Damian is the youngest of all of them.”
Hurley welcomed Damian, 24, with late ex Steve Bing in 2002. Billy Ray, meanwhile, is the father of son Christopher, 34, with ex-girlfriend Kristin Luckey and kids Miley, 33, Braison, 32, and Noah, 26, with ex-wife Tish Cyrus. Billy Ray, 65, also adopted Tish’s kids Brandi, 39, and Trace, 37, from a previous relationship.
“It’s very different. It’s more grown up and it’s easier. Sometimes I miss being a hands-on mummy,” the British actress said. “I don’t miss the school runs. I don’t miss running around the house screaming because I can’t find a tennis racket. I don’t mind missing that. But you do sort of miss, I suppose, being so hands-on. It’s an adjustment to have to make.”
Hurley and Billy Ray initially crossed paths when filming the holiday movie Christmas in Paradise in 2022. The pair later reconnected and went public with their romance in 2025.
“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, there was a chemistry there that [I] felt,” Billy Ray said on Apple Music’s Ty Bentli Show in April 2025. “We just laughed, and it was at a time [when] I wasn’t laughing a lot and I found that the oddest thing.”
He continued, “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?’ At a certain point, it was like, ‘You can’t get knocked down any flatter than lying on your back when life is kicking you in the gut.’”
