It has been just over one year since the highly-anticipated Lizzie McGuire reboot was officially cancelled. But that doesn’t mean Hilary Duff can’t talk about what could have been.
Despite production having already started on the series—as we saw through the endless on-set photos—Disney scrapped the reboot after a disagreement about the spin-off’s storyline.
Only a few months into shooting, the show’s original showrunner Terri Minsky was fired from the revival as Disney had decided to “move in a different creative direction”. And while the exact direction that the company was wanting was never confirmed, rumours began to spread that Disney didn’t want it to air on their streaming platform because the plot was too mature.
Now, Duff is revealing what would have been in store for the series if it hadn’t been scrapped. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, the How I Met Your Father star opened up about what could have been for Lizzie and even spoke candidly on how she felt about the cancellation.
When asked by the interviewer about the Lizzie McGuire reboot, Duff responded by rhetorically asking, “The one that we were actively filming? Yeah, that’s the one.”
“I would be lying if I didn’t say I didn’t have those thoughts a few times,” she explained, after being asked if she’d ever leak episodes.
“But I wouldn’t, because in my 34 years I’ve realised that everything does happen for a reason. There’s a time and a place for everything. It just wasn’t her moment.
“I’m constantly asked about it still,” she added. “All it does is breathe life into the fact that people still want it, and that’s really sweet. It’s not dead, and it’s not alive.”
But what really sparked fans’ attention was Duff’s admission about what the reboot had in store, if it hadn’t been prematurely scrapped. The mother-of-three explained that the series was actually going to follow Lizzie’s life while navigating her thirties, after discovering that her partner had been cheating on her.
“My character was moving back home with her parents because she caught her soon-to-be fiancé cheating on her,” she revealed.
“And she was falling flat on her face at the moment and being like, ‘I need to pivot because everything that I thought was wasn’t, and I’m turning 30. What the f–k?'” she said.
And it turns out, fans weren’t the only ones frustrated with the streaming giant for canning the reboot.
In fact, Duff called out Disney directly in February 2021, writing an Instagram post detailing how she’d be “doing a disservice to everyone by limiting the realities of a 30-year-old’s journey to live under the ceiling for a PG rating”.
But despite publicly requesting that the show move from Disney to Hulu, where it could have the mature storyline that fans were wanting, the reboot was cancelled in its entirety.
“I know the efforts and conversations have been everywhere trying to make a reboot work but, sadly & despite everyone’s best efforts, it isn’t going to happen,” Duff wrote.
“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,” she added. “I’m very sad, but I promise everyone tried their best and the stars didn’t align.”
While speaking to Cosmopolitan, Duff was asked about how it felt to be a child star and if she’d want to do it again, if she were to start her career over.
“Yeah. I wouldn’t do it all exactly the same, but I can’t look at my life and be like, ‘I wish this was different,’ because I don’t know if it would get me to where I am right now,” she said.
“I wish I had a little bit of a better education. I wish I had a little bit of a college experience. But what would that look like? The thing that I crave out of it wouldn’t look the way I pictured it because of who I am and how I came up.”
You can check out Hilary Duff in another reboot, How I Met Your Father, from January 18 here.
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