Anna Maria Perez De Tagle, Miley Cyrus’ superfluously-named costar on “Hannah Montana,” had to talk her friend into not quitting show business after the whole world threw a collective fit in their little cubicles over her seemingly topless Vanity Fair photo spread. Perez De Tagle plays Hannah’s spicy ethnic sidekick, Ashley, for those of you who aren’t all caught up with what tweens watch during sleepovers:

The 15-year-old was forced to apologize to fans when a topless shot of her, wrapped in a bedsheet, appeared as part of a Vanity Fair photo spread, upsetting family groups and parents across America. And Perez de Tagle admits the whole controversy has been tough on her friend. She says, “Sometimes I’ll talk to her on the phone and she’ll be like, ‘It’s really hard’ or ‘I’m really tired. I can’t do this.’ “I’ll always say, ‘You do want to do this. You love your job.’ “It (photo scandal) really hurt her. She didn’t know that people would look at it like that.”

We, too, were unaware that people would look at an underage girl wrapped in a bedsheet as something less than totally awesome. What do you think, though? Should Miley take a break from the business and just pop her pimples and practice kissing on her pillow or other things we never did at fifteen?

And… do you think there would be a different reaction if someone brown like, say, Anna Maria, who is Filipina, would have posed the same way as Miley did for a magazine shoot? We ask because we don’t remember this much of a hoopla when ambiguously ethnic Vanessa Hudgens aired out her not-yet-legal chocha. Most comments were centered around how hot she was — not how inappropriate and sexualized her image had become. Is the difference that Miley’s shoot was calculated and public, while Vanessa’s was meant for private consumption? Or are brown people just expected to be sexually precocious?

Cyrus Almost Quit Over Photo Scandal [IMDB]