Hilary Duff: The Value In Staying True To Your Vision For A Work Project At Hand

Hilary Duff got her start at Disney with her hit series, ‘Lizzie McGuire’ back in 2001. It ran for two seasons and co-starred Adam Lamberg and Lalaine as Lizzie’s two best friends and sidekicks, as well as Hailie Todd and Robert Carradine as Lizzie’s parents, both of whom are related to Hollywood legends. But this was a kid’s show, so no one appreciated Hollywood legends or their relatives unless you were a parent or an adult supervisor watching the show with the kids.

‘Lizzie McGuire was groundbreaking and very much ahead of its time, especially considering it was 2001. The kids that watched it and loved it then are loving it now. A reboot series was even developed and filmed two episodes until it was cancelled altogether. More on that later. But did you know that producers of the show initially weren’t that happy with Hilary Duff being cast as Lizzie after the pilot was filmed? Lindsay Lohan was considered to be cast as Lizzie, and Aaron Carter, both Duff and Lohan’s ex-boyfriend, guest-starred on the show at one point. I can’t imagine anyone other than Hilary Duff playing the role of Lizzie, but that’s just the business.

The 2000’s Golden Era

The 2000’s were golden for Duff and Lohan. They were working and making movies and music all the time. They didn’t stop. And rumours of a rift between the two were swirling because they dated the same person at the same time. This rift brought the two more attention from fans, which brought more monetary gains to their respective projects. For Duff, in particular, it was the success of ‘Lizzie McGuire’. Following the success of the TV series, the ‘Lizzie McGuire Movie’ was released in 2003, which was also successful amongst teens and tweens.

Hilary Duff was certainly worshipped, and it showed in her the success of her career thereafter. She starred in movies such as ‘A Cinderella Story’ with Chad Michael Murray, ‘Cheaper By The Dozen’ with Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt, as well as ‘Raise Your Voice’ with Kay Dennings and John Corbett. She released numerous albums such as 2003’s ‘Metamorphosis’, 2005’s ‘Most Wanted’, and 2007’s ‘Dignity. She was on top of the world. New Disney stars wanted to be just like her too, including Miley Cyrus, who was the subject matter of my two previous posts. The two even got to meet in 2007 during Duff’s ‘Dignity’ era.

I get why she was such a big deal. She was the golden ticket as to who parents around the world wanted their chlisten to look up to. She was the most unproblematic Disney star. Her movies and music weren’t too bad either. I myself attended her ‘Dignity’ tour when she was here in Toronto. The crowd was wild for her. And even her relationship with Joel Madden at the time, who was 9 years her senior and dated Duff between the ages of 16 and 19, didn’t ruin her ‘good girl’ reputation. At the time, people were glorifying it, which is problematic in itself, more than the relationship itself. I guess no one cared to realize that the relationship was sexual, and in 2015, Duff implied that she lost her virginity to Madden. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, she said, ‘I had a 26-year-old boyfriend. So everyone can make their own assumptions about what I was doing.’ But no one did, at least at the time.

A shift in career

Following the end of her relationship with Madden in 2006, Duff went on to date and eventually marry former hockey player, Mike Comrie. They married in 2010, had a son, Luca, in 2012, and eventually divorced in 2014. It was during this time in her life that Duff’s career began to shift. She wasn’t releasing music anymore, and she starred in low budget TV, lesser known movies such as ‘Beauty & The Briefcase’, ‘According To Greta’, ‘What Goes Up’, ‘She Wants Me’, and ‘Stay Cool.’ She also starred and produced 2019’s ‘The Haunting Of Sharon Tate’, which I personally think should’ve never been made in the first place. We barely of her doing any work. Instead, we saw her being a mom to her son, Luca, and attending hockey games to support her husband.

Once Duff separated from Comrie, Duff had her big career comeback. Between 2015 and 2021, Duff starred in ‘Younger’ as Kelsey Peters. Peter Hermann, Sutton Foster, Debi Mazar, and Tortorella also starred. The show was a big hit. As of the writing of this blog post, the show has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But it almost didn’t go to Duff. She initially declined the offer to star in the show because it was filmed in New York, and Duff lived in Los Angeles. In turn, Darren Star, who was also the man behind ‘Sex And The City’ and ‘2 Broke Girls’, called her and told her he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Also in 2015, Duff released her first album in 7 years, ‘Breathe In. Breathe Out.’ The album’s single, ‘Sparks’ was at the top of the Billboard 100 list. It was a hit. It was made with love and care. But there was one major difference between this album in particular and the previous ones, which is that Duff didn’t care so much about the numbers anymore. In an interview with Zach Sang in 2015, when the album was just released, Duff revealed that she had a shift in priorities once her son was born. Her music was more for fun purposes; for a hobby and an excuse to take a break from motherhood. Since the release of the album, she got married again to musician and producer Matthew Koma, who collaborated with Duff on ‘Breathe in. Breathe Out.’, and had 3 more children, and there hasn’t been an album since.

The business of nostalgia

In the same interview with Zach sang, Duff gave all the credit to her success in the music industry to her fans. Even though now it’s a standard for Disney starts to be able to do both singing and acting, that wasn’t the case back when she was employed by the company. Radio stations wouldn’t play Duff’s music at the time of her music career as no one believed she was talented. Those are HER words during the interview.

With that being said, the success of ‘Breathe In. Breathe out.’ also had a lot, if not everything to do with the fans supporting her. They were nostalgic. If she were to tour, I’m sure all the fans that supported her 20 years ago would’ve supported her by buying tickets to her tour as well. Nostalgia is an entire business in itself. Shows like ‘Zoey 101’, ‘iCarly’ and ‘Wizards Of Waverly Place’ have all gotten reboots in recent years. ‘Lizzie McGuire’ also got a reboot in 2019, and every millennial around the world, including me, rejoiced.

It was an exciting time for us all as we’d been waiting for this moment for a very long time. We felt like we grew up with Lizzie, and we wanted to see her as a 30 year old woman and what life was like for her since we last saw her in 2004. We screamed at every update we got on the reboot, and couldn’t wait to see the final product. For me, personally, ‘Lizzie McGuire’ represented the time in my life when I moved to a different country as a teenager. In a way, she not only was with me throughout my teenage years as a friend, but as an English teacher as well. Somehow, all was well in the world.

The reboot version of ‘Lizzie McGuire had original showrunner Terri Minsky returning to the project, as well as original cast including Duff, Todd, Carradine, as well as Adam Lamberg, who played Lizzie’s best friend and sidekick, Gordo, in the original series and movie. Two episodes had been filmed, and Duff posted two photos of herself and her co-stars in October 2019. My millennial heart burst with happiness. By the following year, Minsky was fired by Disney, and the entire show was axed.

Duff wrote on Instagram of the scrapped reboot, ‘I want any reboot of Lizzie to be honest and authentic to who Lizzie would be today. It’s what the character deserves. We can all take a moment to mourn the amazing woman she would have been and the adventures we would have taken with her. I’m very sad, but I promise everyone tried their best, and the stars just didn’t align.’ And then she opened up in an interview with Cosmopolitan, ‘I will forever be grateful for the two episodes that we did shoot. It was a really special two weeks of my life.’

Creative differences

As mentioned previously, two episodes of the ‘Lizzie McGuire’ reboot had been filmed. Earlier this year, Jonathan Hurwitz, one of the writers on the reboot series, recently opened up on social media on the two episodes that had been filmed, as well as the third that was written but never got to be filmed, and what these episodes entailed. He also shared a photo of himself with Duff in the writers’ room with him.

The first episode saw Duff’s character, Lizzie be cheated on by her fiancé and moving back to her parents’ home. The second episode saw Lizzie reconnect with her old friend, Gordo, who’s happily in a relationship and is expecting a baby. Lizzie then gets a text from her old high school flame, Ethan, asking her to meet with him. The third episode, which, again, was written but not filmed, opened with Lizzie and Ethan the morning after they had sex. It wasn’t intended for any sex scenes to be shown, but for it to be an obvious part of the story.

It’s believed that it was that particular scene that got the reboot axed. It was this scene that created these creative differences between Duff and Co. According to Hurwitz, the scene would’ve looked something like this: ‘We weren’t actually going to show them having sex, just Lizzie waking up in Ethan’s shirt and then he comes in with freshly made coffee, and they have this cute little catch up. Animated Lizzie pops up, and she has this little checklist, like a to-do list, and Ethan is on the list, and she checks it off. I think she says something like, ‘I checked that box — dramatic pause — twice.’ So if I had to guess, I saw another comment about storylines Disney wasn’t comfortable with, my guess was… That moment was probably one of them.

Later in the third episode, Lizzie would befriend a gay man named Carson who invites her to move in with him. And then, we’d see Lizzie navigating the start of a new chapter in her life as she enters her 30’s. Duff, for her part, was very disappointed with Disney, but had always maintained in the years since that she was hopeful. In 2022, she told The Cut, I think there’s always a possibility there. And even if she’s 40, I don’t think people care. It’s always going to be somewhat interesting to people to see where she ended up.’

A disservice to the fans

Duff has always been grateful to her fans, and she’s given them credit for her success time and time again. She’s always said that she wouldn’t be where she is without their support. Throughout her ‘Dignity’ tour, she always thanked her fans after each and every song, so much so that it was almost getting annoying. But that’s what really makes her so likeable and appreciated. That’s what’s made her career have such longevity, even when she takes years long breaks from singing or acting. She could’ve still went ahead with the reboot for the money, but she was solely thinking of the fans. In 2022, Duff said in an interview with Women’s Health, ‘She didn’t need to be doing bong rips and having one-night stands all the time, but it had to be authentic.’

Time and time again, Duff has said she’d be doing her fans a disservice if she were to go ahead with Disney’s vision of Lizzie as a 30 year old woman. As a fan of the ‘Lizzie McGuire’ franchise, I can’t really emphasize enough how true this is. I loved ‘Lizzie McGuire’ because I related to her. I felt she was my friend. She did what all 13 year olds did at the time. With that being said, when it was announced that Lizzie was getting another shot at life, I wanted to see her do things that any other 30 year old woman would do; like have sex!

Im both happy and sad that we won’t see Lizzie get her chance to shine again. Im sad that we’re not getting her comeback, but I’m glad that we’re not getting the Disney PG version of Lizzie. I feel that Disney wanted Lizzie to be that same 13 year old girl she was when we first met her in 2001. The fact of the matter is, though, that a 30 year old woman isn’t going to be the same as she was when she was 13, no matter where life takes her. Disney is like that toxic long-term boyfriend who expects the woman to stay exactly the same as she was when he met her; just like Liam Hemsworth was with Miley Cyrus throughout their 10 year relationship, as I explained in my previous post.

I think not going through with Disney’s version of ‘Lizzie McGuire’ was the best decision Hilary Duff made in her entire career. And she’s right. We, the fans would love to see Lizzie at any age, whether it’s as 30 year old, 40 year old, even 80 year old. As long as she’s someone we can relate to, we don’t care when we see her. Luckily, Duff is still eager to give us any version of Lizzie as long as her vision for Lizzie aligns with what a network will allow her to showcase. I’m very excited to see Lizzie at any age, as long as I can relate to her. This is what dreams are made of….am I right?