Hilary Duff Recalls Being ‘Done’ With Lizzie McGuire as a Teen, Admits Experience Wasn’t ‘Fun Anymore’

Hilary Duff wanted to shed her Lizzie McGuire TV persona after filming.

In an interview with Paper, published last week, the pop star, now 39, was asked how she feels singing her hit track “What Dreams Are Made Of” as an adult versus when she recorded it at 15. The song appeared in the 2003 flick The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Duff re-recorded the track on her new EP Mine.

“When I look back at that, I’m like, oh my god, I would love a redo. I think I was 14, maybe 15, shooting that movie. They have me for this amount of hours, it’s a rush, there’s a body double. All of it was just so crazy,” Duff remembered. “I’m so glad it resonated with people this many years later, and that they loved it and ate it up. But when I perform it now, I’m like, oh, I’m in this. Back then, I just feel like I wasn’t in my body yet.”

The former Disney Channel star recalled wanting to differentiate herself from her Lizzie McGuire character as a teenager.

“And I was pretty done with Lizzie at that time. I had filmed 30 episodes one year and 35 episodes the next. I turned into a huge star,” Duff recounted. “Everyone called me Lizzie. And then I went to Italy to film that movie, and I think I was just like, I’m [expletive] done with you. I want people to see me. This isn’t fun anymore.”

“So now when I sing it, it feels so much better, and I get to join the celebration of what it meant to people, and what it means to me now. I don’t want to sound ungrateful for doing it, but at the time, I was pretty exhausted by it,” she admitted. “I was trying to create Hilary Duff separate from Lizzie, so that was right at the midway point where I was like, I’m never singing that song. And I didn’t even own it. It wasn’t my song to sing. But now I feel like it is.”

The “Roommates” singer, of course, came back around to Lizzie in adulthood as the Lizzie McGuire reboot series for Disney+ was announced in 2019. However, the show’s original creator, Terri Minsky, left the project in January 2020 because of creative differences, and it never aired.

“I am so proud of the two episodes we did,” Minsky told Variety in a February interview that year. “Hilary has a grasp of Lizzie McGuire at 30 that needs to be seen. It’s a wonderful thing to watch. I would love the show to exist, but ideally I would love it if it could be given that treatment of going to Hulu and doing the show that we were doing.”

In December 2020, Duff confirmed the project would not move forward via an Instagram post, telling fans, “I’ve been so honored to have the character of Lizzie in my life.”