Remember when the title character from Lizzie McGuire was everywhere? She was on lunch boxes, watches, board games and even sleeping bags. Hilary Duff, who played her on the Disney show from 2001 to 2004, sure does.
“There was a point in my life where I couldn’t stand Lizzie McGuire. And I was like, ‘I don’t want to hear that name ever again,'” Duff, now 33, explained on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show. “And now that I’m my age, I’m like, I love her. She’s, you know, this is where it all began for me. And she is, she is me and I am her. And I brought what I could to that, you know, which was very much just who I am inside. And so to tap into that again, even for a moment was, was really a great experience.”
The moment she mentioned was when she resumed the role long enough to film two episodes of an updated version of the show before it was scrapped. The problem, Duff said in a December statement, was essentially that the creative team and the network couldn’t settle on what it should look like.
Duff explained then then that it was important to her for any new series to be “honest and authentic to who Lizzie would be today,” as a 30-year-old woman. She issued it after the family-friendly network parted ways with original showrunner Terri Minsky.
On The Jess Cagle Show, Duff spoke a little more about her feelings on the subject.
“I think they [are] really trying to figure out what kind of content they want living on Disney+, and that doesn’t totally align with, like, where I see Lizzie right now, you know,” Duff said. “And I’m like very protective of her and they’re very protective of her. But the one thing for me was just the way that she could connect with what was going on in, in people that were watching the show. It was like they’re watching themselves, you know … and that was where they related. And so for me, you know … it only makes sense to me to shoot a show where she’s acting like a 30-year-old in a modern world.”
She reiterated how “lovely” it was to film with her former castmates for even three weeks.
“To see a lot of the cast, the original cast, like, you know, we’re, we’re different humans now,” Duff said. “And so that was, it was just like all love. And it still is.”
Duff reunited with much of the cast again in May 2020 for a table read of a 2001 episode of the show, which featured Lizzie deciding that she should get her first bra.
While the idea of a new Lizzie McGuire is still a no-go for now, Duff isn’t closing the door definitively.
“You never, never say never in this business,” she said.
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