Hilary Duff Claims She Was Typecast For Years After ‘Lizzie McGuire’
‘Lizzie McGuire‘ star Hilary Duff claims she was typecast for years after landing her hit Disney Channel role. The 33-year-old recently spoke with Cosmopolitan about her ‘Lizzie McGuire‘ legacy overshadowing her talent.
Duff says, “I definitely went through big frustrations of being like, ‘Why can I not get a shot at being someone else?’ Not that I want to dog every casting director out there, but there’s a very small handful of people who are character actors and can be hired for roles that are truly different from one another. From age 21 to 25, before I became a mom, there was a lot of frustration.”
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Duff goes on to add that, “I would get to producer callback and they’d be like, ‘She’s so great and she gave us the best reading and blah blah blah, but she’s Hilary Duff…’” She says over the years, she’s now moved past the frustrations of her role defining her career. She continues, “I’m at such a different place in my life now, being a mother and a wife – it doesn’t weigh on me any more. I don’t feel like people only see me that way, but [even] when they do, I feel appreciative of it because [Lizzie McGuire] was very impactful on so many people’s lives.”
When talking about the recently announced reboot of the show, Duff says, “They asked me for years and years: ‘Let’s do a reboot, let’s do a reboot,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, no.’ Finally, last year, I was like, ‘I feel ready.’ It just doesn’t annoy me any more when people refer to me as Lizzie McGuire or say that was my biggest role, because it paved the way for all the other roads I’ve been able to take.”
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Despite talks of the reboot, it’s since been put on an indefinite hold after the showrunner abruptly exited the series in January 2020.