Hilary Duff is back on our TV screens, but not as Lizzie McGuire.
Sure, How I Met Your Mother fans are excited to see the debut of the Duff-starring reboot titled How I Met Your Father, but for many who grew up on the quintessential Disney Channel series, it’s a cruel reminder of what could have been. .
Duff, of course, was to spearhead the revival of Lizzie McGuire on Disney+, along with a slew of the show’s original stars. But months after the streaming service first announced the project and several episodes had already been filmed, the revival was unceremoniously canceled due to its more mature direction.
Speaking to Cosmopolitan in an interview published Tuesday, Duff finally revealed what Lizzie has been up to all these years later, giving the rest of us a better idea of why Disney (wrongly) dropped the project.
“My character was coming home with her parents because she caught her future fiancé cheating and at that moment she fell face down and said: “I need to change because everything I thought was not there, and I’m turning 30. What the hell?” she said.
When asked if she ever considered leaking revival episodes, Duff admitted that it definitely crossed her mind.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say several times that I didn’t have such thoughts,” she said.
“But I wouldn’t, because at 34 I realized that everything happens for a reason,” she continued. “Everything has its time and place. It just wasn’t her moment. I still get asked this all the time. All he does is breathe life into the fact that people still want it, which is really sweet. He is neither dead nor alive.”
First announced by Duff herself at the Disney+ D23 Expo in August 2019, the new version of “Lizzie McGuire” began filming in New York City in November of that year before being halted just months later. Original series creator Terry Minsky then left the show due to backstage clashes over creative differences, with sources close to the production claiming that Disney+ pushed for the revival to “appeal to kids and families” and be more “like the original”. “. row.”
Duff even talked about the responsibility she felt to honor the character’s legacy and that she would do “a disservice to everyone by limiting the realities of a 30-year-old’s journey to live under a PG rating ceiling.”
“It’s important to me that just as her experience as a teenager/teenager was authentic, her next chapters are just as real and connected,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.
She ended her post by asking Disney to move the series to Hulu. However, her requests went unanswered and the revival was officially ended in December 2020.
Naturally, Duff was a little hesitant about signing up for another reboot when the makers of How I Met Your Father offered her the part.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this. I was on my way to reboot and I was trying. And I don’t think I can handle it,” she recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “And they’re like, ‘No, it’s not like a reboot in that sense.'”
And while she might return to Lizzie McGuire one day, Duff said she’s focused on the new series right now, adding: “It came at the right time and it was one of those things where you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, certainly. This is right, and this is how it should be.”
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