Even as she steps back into music with her new single, “Mature,” Hilary Duff — like her fans — is not quite over the Lizzie McGuire reboot that almost was.
In a Nov. 5 appearance on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast, Duff opened up about why the planned (and partially filmed) revival never made it to Disney+, and what she imagines Lizzie’s love life might have looked like two decades after the original series.
A Creative Crossroads
As you may remember, the Lizzie McGuire reboot was first announced in 2019. But in early 2020, original series creator Terri Minsky exited the project. “After filming two episodes, we concluded that we need to move in a different creative direction and are putting a new lens on the show,” a Disney spokesperson said at the time.
That shift in direction never panned out, though. Despite Minsky and Duff’s desire for Lizzie to move to Hulu — as Duff said, she didn’t want her character to “live under the ceiling of a PG rating” — the project was formally scrapped by December 2020.
“I think that there was just [disagreements] on how far we could take her and where she is— she would’ve been, as we were filming that, 30 or 31,” Duff said on Therapuss. “And for me, I was that age, you know?”
Having grown up with the titular Lizzie, Duff felt “so deeply connected” to her journey. “And I was like, oh man, we can’t Mary Tyler Moore her,” she continued, nodding to the 1970s sitcom, which was modern in its time. But, as Duff noted, “It was like, 2023 … I wasn’t trying to have her wake up and do, like, bong rips or anything. But she was a normal 30-year-old, you know? So there were some things I think they just weren’t totally willing to go there.”
The Lizzie That Could Have Been
As for what “there” might entail, there are some buzzy details out there. Jonathan Hurwitz, a writer for the series, previously shared on TikTok that the show originally began with Lizzie living in New York — only to move back into her childhood home after she’s cheated on. Here, “Little animated Lizzie has been waiting for her.” Aww!
Hurwitz said that in the planned series, Gordo was in a relationship of his own. And indeed, as Duff shared on Therapuss, she believes the childhood besties once took “another swing at it that didn’t [work]. Yeah, devastating, right?”
Duff said she thinks Lizzie had a “very quick” situation with someone else from her past: Ethan Craft (aka, Lizzie’s crush whose iconic hair tip changed the way countless young viewers approached shampoo).
When that didn’t work out, Duff theorized, Gordo would have been “there to pick up the pieces.”
So, is there a chance that the creative powers that be might — like the theme song says — figure it out? Jake Thomas, who played Duff’s on-screen little brother, recently told People that he remains “very optimistic” about the prospects of a revival. “I still think that the show holds such a very special cultural value to a millennial audience, and there’s definitely a hunger for that audience to see what their favorite characters are up to these days and how they’ve adapted to this world,” he said.
