Why Doctor Called Miley Cyrus 'Disgusting' After Injuring Her Knee While Filming Visual Album

The 32-year-old Grammy winner appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Thursday night, where she revealed the she ended up in the ICU with a gnarly infection after filming a segment of her upcoming project Something Beautiful, which drops May 30.

Cyrus told Kimmel the injury stemmed from a late-night shoot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for the track "Walk of Fame." Why the late-night guerrilla filming? She didn’t have the budget to secure the space legally.

"I had a big dream and a small budget," Cyrus explained. "I had a pretty good budget, but I spent it all on my clothes."

The impromptu plan came with serious consequences, however.

"I caught something" she revealed, after crawling around the Walk of Fame pavement in October 2024. By Thanksgiving, she was in the ICU.

"Because I filmed this video in October, and by November on Thanksgiving, I was put in ICU," she said. "My leg began to disintegrate ... around the kneecap area. And then the doctor goes, 'Do you have any idea why you would have such a brutal infection on your kneecap?'"

When she explained how it happened, the doctor didn't hole back their criticism, calling Cyrus disgusting for rolling around on the streets of Hollywood.

"I had to tell him," Cyrus said. "To have a surgeon look at you and say, 'Yuck…' They open up cadavers. They see inside the guts of humans, and they're looking at me, telling me I'm disgusting. And they do brain operations!"

She was quick to clarify that her ICU stint was "just for a moment," joking that she only landed there because the regular ER was packed with holiday-related injuries.

While she's fully recovered now, Cyrus said the memory still haunts her.

"Have you been to the Walk of Fame in the middle of the night?" she asked Kimmel. "I thought it was my last day."

Cyrus is luckily able to laugh it off now, telling Kimmel, "I wanted this video to be so fabulous and now I just told everyone such a filthy [story]…," prompting the late night hose to joke that she "nearly gave [her] life" for her art.

"I did, so they'd better go see it," Cyrus stressed.

As for the visual, Cyrus said there isn't much of a story, with the singer saying she let the music do the talking on this one.

"The music is the story. Every song is storytelling," she explained. "Even though this has become very kind of psychedelic and over the top -- like everything that I do -- but at the end of it, really the heart of it is just the music. Really, the storytelling. So there was no need for characterization because I'm the character. And I never want to become something or someone that I'm not."

Aiming to keep the visuals open-ended, Cyrus added, "I wanted it to be blank enough that people can infuse what they want to see in this visual album while I'm fully satisfied. And I'm really proud of it."

Something Beautiful -- both the album and its visual companion -- drops May 30.