Liv And Mia Tyler Recalled Discovering They Were Sisters After Meeting At Their Dad’s Aerosmith Show, And The Story Is Totally Wild
“It was literally like looking in the mirror, seeing your double… My mom bawled, and I was like, ‘Is Steven my dad?’”
Sisters Liv and Mia Tyler just appeared on the Sibling Revelry podcast with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson, and the story of how they first met is truly something from a movie script.
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For context, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler has four children with three different women: he shares his eldest child, Liv, with Bebe Buell, Mia with his first ex-wife, Cyrinda Foxe, and Chelsea and Taj with his second ex-wife, Teresa Barrick. The four siblings have close relationships today. However, it wasn’t until Liv was nearly 10 years old that she discovered she was actually a Tyler and not a Rundgren, as she’d previously been led to believe.
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First, we need to rewind to sometime in 1976 when Liv’s mom, Bebe, was introduced to Steven; the two hooked up, and she got pregnant. Speaking on the latest episode of Kate and Oliver Hudson’s podcast, Liv recalled that her mom was in her early 20s at the time and was not comfortable with Steven’s drug use, so she decided to leave and raise her baby with her ex, Todd Rundgren.
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“I think she got a little bit scared when she realized how much drugs my dad was doing. I think as the story goes: she called Todd and said she was pregnant… and basically, he very courageously and lovingly said, ‘This child needs a father, and I will be the father,’” Liv recalled. Todd signed Liv’s birth certificate when she was born, and looking back she suggested that there may have been an “agreement” that she should “never know” the true identity of her father.
So, Liv was born in July 1977 and was raised in Maine, believing that Todd was her biological father. Meanwhile, in 1978, her birth father, Steven, married Cyrinda Foxe, and the couple welcomed their first child in December of that same year. Mia was raised in New Hampshire, and it wasn’t for another 8 years or so that the sisters met for the first time when their moms brought them to the same Aerosmith concert.
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“I remember there were no kids backstage. So we played hard that night. And we were at this VIP area, outside of the green rooms, and we were just like, you know, doing our eight and nine-year-old thing, and this fan lady came up, and she was like, ‘Oh my god, you girls are so cute. Are you guys sisters?’… And we pretended we were sisters,” Mia remembered, as Liv recalled they “looked like twins.”
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Liv said that her mother and Steven were on good terms at this point and that her mom had already indicated to her that she had a sister but that the details were “so complicated.” “Throughout the course of that year, [Steven] was around more. I had no idea who he was then. I just thought he was fabulous,” she remembered.
Recalling the story of their first meeting, both sisters fought tears. “Guns n’ Roses were opening for Aerosmith,” Liv said. “We had driven to the gig at a place called Great Woods… I was so excited because I just loved Guns n’ Roses. And on the side of the stage was this one standing there.”
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“I just remember standing there watching them play, looking and seeing this girl who looked exactly like me. Like, we literally had the same outfit on. We had both had perms, like spiral perms, pink frosty lipstick,” she continued. “We were both wearing an Aerosmith concert T-shirt with black leggings and Reebok high-top sneakers. I looked, and I was like, Wait, that’s me. It was really weird. It was literally like looking in the mirror, seeing your double.”
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Liv was taken aback by how much Mia looked like her, and when she looked over at her mom, it became obvious that she was emotional, too. “She just started crying. My mom bawled, and I was like, ‘Is Steven my dad?’” she recalled, revealing this was when she finally learned the truth about her family. “We sat on a bench at an outdoor amphitheater, and she told me the whole story in the most sincere, beautiful way… And then we went backstage after the show there was Mia, and we met for the first time.”
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Mia and Liv didn’t explicitly know they were sisters at this point, although it wasn’t long before they had confirmation and the two started sending each other postcards, realizing they had “so much in common.”
And while the discovery was very exciting for the girls, it was equally challenging for Liv to learn that Todd wasn’t her real dad. Speaking about Todd today, she said: “I think it’s probably still very hard and painful, and I don’t speak to him enough. I love him. I have brothers from him and I had a whole family with them.”
Honestly, someone needs to make a movie about this family. You can listen to Mia and Liv’s full appearance on the Sibling Revelry podcast here.
