Hilary Duff is the star of How I Met Your Father on Hulu and her breakout role was on Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire.
On the latest season of the How I Met Your Mother spinoff, Duff’s Sophie recalls a moment from her teenage years and a flashback scene from Lizzie McGuire appears. The nod to the kids’ show was to all of the fans disappointed the reboot didn’t happen, something that Duff recently recalled.
“I don’t think it was enough to satisfy the fact that [the Disney+ Lizzie McGuire revival] project is shelved,” she told Shape in a recent interview.
One of the highly-touted projects for the then-nascent Disney+ streamer was a revival of Lizzie McGuire. However, the show did not move forward over creative differences as Duff wanted a show tackling Lizzie’s problems as an adult while Disney reportedly wanted it to keep its family-oriented vibe.
Duff recently said she was still “optimistic” about the reboot happening.
While making an appearance on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, Duff said she would still want to star in an updated version of the Disney Channel series. “Disney+ was very new and I think they were figuring out their… and we were figuring out our… and I am optimistic,” Duff said of why the show was ultimately scrapped.
Duff, being the star of a Hulu series, had previously proposed Disney shift the Lizzie McGuire series over to them just like the Love, Victor series that had originally been developed for Disney+ but ultimately aired initially on Hulu in the U.S. market.
“It would be a dream if Disney would let us move the show to Hulu, if they were interested, and I could bring this beloved character to life again,” Duff wrote on Instagram back in 2000.
Watch Lizzie’s cameo on How I Met Your Father in the video posted below.
Earlier this year, How I Met Your Father showrunner Elizabeth Berger confirmed that including the Lizzie McGuire clip was a nod to fans disappointed the revival didn’t materialize.
“Yeah, we can give people a tiny taste of what they didn’t get with that reboot,” Berger told EW. “We just try and give everybody every experience they can ever dream of. That was really fun to do.”