If there’s one thing Hilary Duff is always going to do, it’s represent millennial culture in every way. After growing up with a whole generation throughout the 2000s, she’s become possibly the closest thing to a patron saint for millennials. So of course, her first celebrity crush is incredibly relatable to everyone else who grew up in the ‘90s.
Duff opened up about her earliest hottie of choice during her May 20 appearance on The Jennifer Hudson Show. The topic came up because at the start of 2026, Jacob Elordi announced that Duff was his childhood crush. For Duff herself, it was another big TV star who caught her eye.
“My first celebrity crush was Jonathan Taylor Thomas. JTT, c’mon!” Duff said. “He was on Home Improvement. He was also in Lion King; he was the voice of Simba.”
Thomas was a very popular crush throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s, but he famously disappeared from TV and movies at the height of his fame. He stepped away from Home Improvement in its later seasons to focus on high school, and after 2005, he stopped acting altogether. “I’d been going nonstop since I was 8 years old,” Thomas told People in 2013. “I wanted to go to school, to travel and have a bit of a break … I never took the fame too seriously. It was a great period in my life, but it doesn’t define me. When I think back on the time, I look at it with a wink. I focus on the good moments I had, not that I was on a lot of magazine covers.”
Along with Thomas, Duff admitted she also had a thing for another shaggy-haired fixture of the ‘90s. “Also, the Hanson brother. The little one: Zac,” Duff said.
While those teen idols may have evaded Duff back in the day, she did have some high-profile romances with a few other heartthrobs of the era, including Aaron Carter and Frankie Muniz.
Now, Duff is happily married to Matthew Koma, a fellow musician who produced her new album Luck… or something.
