Jason Earles Almost Didn't Audition for “Hannah Montana” When He Found Out His...

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...Character Was an Orangutan Puppet

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The actor said his character was originally going to speak through an orangutan puppet

John Russell
Tue, March 4, 2025 at 10:12 AM PST·2 min read

Jason Earles wasn’t super impressed with one of his co-stars in the original Hannah Montana pilot.

On the most recent episode of the Magical Rewind podcast, the actor told hosts Will Friedle and Sabrina Bryan that the beloved show’s original pilot script was so “dumb” he almost didn’t audition for the role of Jackson Stewart.

“The original Jackson was the worst,” Earles, 47, said of his character, the older brother of Miley Cyrus’ title role. “He was so introverted, and he didn't know how to, like, handle his sister's success. And so his way of coping with the world was talking with an orangutan hand puppet. It was awful.”

“It was funny,” he added. “It was just really stupid.”

Earles ultimately did audition for the role, which he played in all four seasons of Hannah Montana and in the 2009 movie based on the show. Despite his misgivings, Earles said he dove right into working with the puppet in preparation to film the series’ pilot episode.

“I worked very hard. Like, I worked with a puppeteer, and the puppet itself was awesome,” he recalled. “We were three days away from shooting the pilot. We've done rehearsals for, like, five days with this puppet.”

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According to Earles, the Disney Channel show’s writers eventually realized that his big-brother-kid-sister dynamic with Cyrus worked better without the simian intermediary.

“If you watch the pilot, there's a scene where Miley, myself, and Billy Ray [Cyrus] are sitting around the table in the kitchen, and we're sort of bantering. And it's one of the first times you really see Miley and I sort of talk junk to each other,” he explained. “We did that in one of the early run-throughs, and the writers were like, ‘Well, that's what it is. He's the one guy that's not, like, impressed.’ ”

“So, they actually ended up rewriting everything around that aspect of it and punted the puppet three days before we shot the pilot,” he said.