“I don’t miss running around the house screaming because I can’t find a tennis racket.” Elizabeth Hurley, 61, was talking about the end of school-age parenting, and she sounded entirely at peace with it.
On the 23 October episode of the “Off Air with Jane & Fi” podcast, Hurley described how her family fits together with that of her boyfriend, Billy Ray Cyrus. “Well, it works very well, I think,” she said. The reason is timing. “Billy and I are empty nesters. All our children are independent and Damian is the youngest of all of them.”
Two households, and the gap between them
Damian is 24. Hurley had him in 2002 with her late ex Steve Bing. Cyrus, 65, has a longer list. His son Christopher is 34, from a relationship with Kristin Luckey. With his ex-wife Tish Cyrus he has Miley, 33, Braison, 32, and Noah, 26. He also adopted Tish’s children Brandi, 39, and Trace, 37.
Hurley has done this before, and she drew the contrast herself. Her earlier boyfriend, the cricketer Shane Warne, who died in 2022, had three children. They were close in age to Damian, or a few years older. “But they were kids,” she said. “They were at school. There were still school runs, school holidays. There was an awful lot to juggle.”
What does that change in practice? Strategically, a great deal. A household with children in school runs on a timetable that nobody in the new couple controls. Take the timetable away and the adults are left to work out the relationship itself.
What she misses
“It’s very different. It’s more grown up and it’s easier,” Hurley said. She did not pretend it came free. “Sometimes I miss being a hands-on mummy.” The school runs she can live without. Being so hands-on, she admitted, she does miss. “It’s an adjustment to have to make.”
The two met filming the holiday movie Christmas in Paradise in 2022 and went public with the romance in 2025. Cyrus told Apple Music’s Ty Bentli Show in April 2025 that they shared very few scenes. The few they did share left an impression. “There was a chemistry there that [I] felt,” he said. “We just laughed, and it was at a time [when] I wasn’t laughing a lot.”
A bigger blend
Jeff Bezos shows the same arithmetic at much larger scale. He has four children with ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, and since he married Lauren Sánchez Bezos in June 2025 he has three stepchildren as well: Nikko, Evan and Ella. Sánchez Bezos likened the family to the “Brady Bunch” in a January 2023 conversation with WSJ. Magazine. “On a typical Saturday, we hang out, we have dinner with the kids,” she said, “because you never know where the conversation is going to go with this many kids.”
Hurley’s version is quieter. Seven grown children between them, one podcast answer, and no tennis rackets to hunt for.
Sources
- Stepfamily
- Elizabeth Hurley Praises Blended Family With Billy Ray Cyrus: ‘It’s More Grown Up and It’s Easier’
- Elizabeth Hurley explains what makes her blended family with Billy Ray Cyrus work
- Elizabeth Hurley shares experience of 'grown-up' blended family with Billy Ray Cyrus
- Area school districts report decline in student count – Tri-City Times
- Meet the Kids of the World’s Richest Billionaires
Photo: Downtowngal (CC BY-SA 3.0)
