Miley Cyrus eyes a 'Twilight'-like role in 'Wake'

By Sarah Sluis

Miley Cyrus has already gone from being a tween superstar to a household name among all ages. Now she's doing something harder: aging up and into more mature roles. Cyrus may star in Wake, the first in a series of young adult novels about a girl who gets caught up in other people's dreams. It sounds like her character

has a similar talent to Leonardo DiCaprio in this summer's Inception, but her gift is more supernatural and less sci-fi. Because the book has horror and suspense elements, the tone will be edgier without being sexier. She's gotten a lot of heat lately for provocative performances at recent concerts, but the seventeen-year-old's first non-Hannah Montana feature was comparatively tame. She played the lead in The Last Song, a Nicholas Sparks adaptation that was written especially for her and thus certified to be Cyrus family-friendly.

Wake is the first in a series that now encompasses three books, the latter two entitled Fade and Gone. The girl, Janie, has the ability to go inside other people's dreams if they are physically near her. She also discovers that she can direct their dreams, turning the fears expressed in nightmares into something more manageable. She can give people closure. She drops in on the dream of a burnout named Cabel, and discovers that there's a lot more there than meets the eye--he becomes her boyfriend and later her sidekick as she tries to figure out who dreamed one horrible dream she cannot forget. The movie will be distributed by Paramount and MTV Films (which passed on Twilight) is developing the project. Christopher Landon (Disturbia) will write the script, and whether or not Cyrus gets on board will depend on the quality of the script.

So kudos to Miley. The project's supernatural overtones put it in the trendy Twilight territory without being directly vampire-related.Also, although the heroine has a boyfriend, it's not a romance, so Cyrus isn't going the rom-com route--thank goodness. She's still stuck in a hard game, and there's plenty of popular young actresses popular in the tabloids but unable to make the switch to adult roles. Lindsay Lohan crashed and burned her way out of Disney movies, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have more success now with fashion than they do on movie sets. Cyrus has never appealed to me--she has a kind of awkward demeanor that's inconsistent with being a movie star without being charming in its own way. While she has hordes of young fans, it's possible that her grown-up fans may want to cast her off instead of growing up with her. Just one more note to Miley about her image: stop slouching!