As Miley steps into her first TV gig since Hannah Montana wrapped in 2011, we find a full-fledged woman who understands her power—there’s a lot of it!—and is determined to put it to good use.By Amanda FitzSimonsPublished: Sep 28, 2016

This article originally appeared in the October 2016 issue of ELLE.

Miley Cyrus has this term: “doing it.” It roughly translates to “trying” or “acting”—and it’s not a compliment. Because, in Miley World, one of the worst things you can be is disingenuous. (People who suck up to her because she’s famous are “doing it”; the notoriously curmudgeonly Woody Allen, who directed her in this fall’s Amazon series, Crisis in Six Scenes, is, according to Cyrus, “not doing it.”)

Cyrus is, above all, staunchly committed to not doing it. After being in the system (another Miley-ism, this one for the entertainment industry) for most of her sentient years and fulfilling all the press obligations that come with promoting albums, tours, and television shows, Cyrus rejected it about a year ago—deciding to no longer employ a publicist and instead to share her life with her fans only via Instagram, where her followers find a mix of political commentary, New Age–y cheerleading, and images of her many animals. But she did decide to talk to ELLE, in part to get the word out about her new role as a coach on NBC’s The Voice, where she’s joining Alicia Keys, Blake Shelton, and Adam Levine for the show’s eleventh season, airing Mondays and Tuesdays this fall. And in part because she wanted “to do something like this where we are really talking, rather than somebody talking at me for five seconds.” We sat down twice with Cyrus over the course of two days, first at The Voice‘s Burbank, California, set, while she applied makeup between takes. (Cyrus doesn’t have a glam squad either—that would be the height of “doing it.”) She had just taken a break from filming an off-site mentoring session in which contestants receive singing and performance advice from Cyrus and special guest “advisor” Joan Jett. Cyrus burst into the greenroom where Adam (not Levine), her longtime manager, was scrolling on his iPhone. She went straight for him; demonstrating the same impressive, Pilates-honed inner-thigh strength she famously used on a wrecking ball, she managed to playfully wrap her lean, black tights–clad legs around Adam’s neck. She looked up at me midstraddle—her face now surprisingly mature, and arrestingly beautiful—and said, with complete self-awareness, in her lilting, slightly Southern baritone: “Miley Cyrus, nice to meetcha!”