LOS ANGELES – The hyper and bubbly Miley Cyrus could not contain her excitement when we asked her how great a kisser her leading man, Liam Hemsworth, was in “The Last Song.”

With a big wide smile, Miley said, “I give him two thumbs up!”

In her first drama movie, Miley falls in love with Liam, a charming Australian surfer dude who plays Will Blakelee in the movie.

“Liam is a great guy. He is my soulmate and my best friend forever,” she confessed.

We reminded Miley that last time we talked to her, she told us that she loves to talk so much so she doesn’t mind if her boyfriend was quiet. So is Liam quiet, we asked.

“No,” she quickly replied with a smile. “Yeah, that wish did not come true. He’s not quiet. I am pretty quick. I jazz back and forth but somehow he always one-ups me and it really makes me angry. It’s like everything he does, he always has something that’s funnier. Just like the other day, he was talking to my dog and my dog did accidents all over the house. With a blank facial expression, he goes, ‘I am so angry,’ but he didn’t look angry at all and my mom cracked up for like 20 minutes. He’s really funny and sometimes it intimidates me that everyone else laughs at his jokes and not mine. So I’m always looking for new material.”

Asked how love has changed her, the singer-actress replied, “Just like in the film, love makes me feel beautiful. It makes me feel good about myself and that’s not all it is. There’s someone helping complete you and you learn more about yourself. What love is is just someone that continues to inspire you always and especially to be a better person. That’s what Liam does to me. That’s what Will does to Ronnie (her character in the movie). Once you have that in your life, you continue to get a better version of yourself.”

Miley admitted that she and Liam did fall in love on the movie. She said, “Yeah, I guess. There’s just this type of charm working with someone and like wanting to impress them. He is a fun person to work with.”

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Liam, a 6’4” tall charmer who is 20 years old, is just happy to be working in Hollywood and with Miley.
When we interviewed Liam, he revealed how he got the role in “The Last Song,” which was based on Nicholas Sparks’ book of the same name. He said, “I was flown in from Australia to do a screen test for the Marvel Comic Book ‘Thor’ (which his older brother Chris ended up getting).” He disclosed, “The intention was if that didn’t happen, I would be here for three months on a holiday visa and if I don’t get work within that time, I’d have to go home. But it was four or five weeks in and I had an audition for ‘The Last Song.’ I read the script and really liked it. I think Nicholas Sparks’ stories are moving and touching and they make people feel emotions. Yeah, and then I landed up within five weeks and it was great.”

The hunky actor confessed that falling in love with Miley on the set “was natural. It was somewhat unavoidable, I guess. But we got along really well outside the camera as well. We enjoyed being around each other. We spent a lot of time together and filming together everyday. We were pretty much each other’s only friends down there so what happened was natural.”

So did Liam pass the “Dad test,” we asked him. “Yeah, I did,” he replied with a smile. “Billy (Ray Cyrus) is great. I love Billy. He’s one of the funniest, strangest people I’ve ever met. He has this dog, Tex. It’s a German Shepherd that follows him around everywhere and it’s just hilarious because he talks to it like a human. I think one of the first times I had come over when he’d come down to Tybee (the island where they shot the movie) and the dog was sitting on the couch. I was patting it and Billy came in and asked if I would look after his dog. He’s like a wild wolf that’s been trained to live in my house with people. I was like, ‘Okay.’ He walked out of the room, and that was kind of my first introduction to Billy Ray. He’s an interesting person.”

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Robert Downey Jr., whom we interviewed for “Iron Man 2,” told us how it was like to be a thinking man’s super hero.

Robert replied, “Any thinking at all makes you the thinking man’s superhero. It’s not a coming of age story. It’s a man already of age and needing to be corrected, cosmically and all that, so I think it’s a much more adult framework for development.”

He said of his previous “bad” movies, “I think I’m a pretty smart guy and I know what I’m smart about is that I’ve been in so many movies that sucked. I’ve worked with so many directors who knew what they were doing or knew what they were doing except in this area or didn’t really know what they were doing in any area and yet were condescending to me. So I have a variety of tendrils of reasons and reactions of why I consider myself an expert on the field of how to not make a bad movie.”

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We talked to the lovely Scarlett Johansson also for “Iron Man 2.” Scarlett disclosed that she enjoyed working with Robert.

She said, “Robert is hilarious. It’s hard to get a huge guffaw, a big laugh out of me, but I appreciate good humor. I like dry, quick wit and I think a little speckling of sarcasm is ok in there. I like quick humor.”

As Natalie Rushman/Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Scarlett described her character as “not really a Bond girl. She’s more like a crazy Muay Thai expert. Bond girls are sort of damsels in distress. All of that inspiration is in the character’s story already. She has a huge history, an amazing origin story.

She’s a bad ass. It’s all written there. So, you read the comics and you're training for this. You feel strong and you look strong. You’re doing all of this work and then once you zip up that suit, that’s like the final touch.”

For the role, Scarlett got into a different fitness regime before she got into her Black Widow suit. She said, “You become suddenly super athletic. You feed yourself like an athlete and you work out like an athlete. You’re super clean, efficient, sleeping less, feeling refreshed, looking good, lean and all that stuff.”

E-mail the writer at jrnepales_624@yahoo.com for your comments and questions.