Hilary Duff Teases 'How I Met Your Father' and if 'Lizzie McGuire' Reboot Will Ever Happen

Hilary Duff
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The actress says 'How I Met Your Father' will tie in to the original 'How I Met Your Mother' series.

Hilary Duff is dishing about the highly anticipated How I Met Your Father series -- a spinoff of the popular How I Met Your Mother series -- in which she's playing the lead role.

The 33-year-old actress made an appearance on SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Show on Thursday, and shared that the series will tie in with the original How I Met Your Mother and will hopefully feature guest appearances by the original cast. The original cast includes Josh Radnor, Cobie Smulders, Jason Segel, Alyson Hannigan and Neil Patrick Harris.

"I mean, the script was so good," Duff says about what attracted her to the project. "I literally called and I was like, 'Please, yes, please have them pick me.' I don't want to give it all away and the script is definitely being changed a little bit. But it does tie in and, you know, hopefully we'll have some fun guest appearances from the original cast."

The show is set in New York, but will be filming in Los Angeles. Duff plays Sophie, who tells her son the story of how she met his dad. Through its signature narrative voiceovers, How I Met Your Father goes "back in time" to 2021, where Sophie and her group of friends are in the midst of figuring out who they are, what they want out of life and how to fall in love in the age of dating apps and limitless options in NYC.

"There are great characters and I'm going to get to have another on set family, and another TV family," Duff says. "And there's so much opportunity for love stories with this show because it's Sophie and then, three dudes. So it's going down that whole rabbit hole of like, well, which one was the one, and who was the father? And you get to go through all of ...Sophie's young experience of finding love and dating and what that's like in the modern world. So, it does tie in, but I don't know how much I can say. Nothing's totally set."

Duff also talked about the now-dead Lizzie McGuire reboot. Fans were disappointed in December when she announced that the reboot was no longer happening.

"I think they are really trying to figure out what kind of content they want living on Disney+, and that doesn't totally align with like, where I see Lizzie right now, you know, and I'm very protective of her and they're very protective of her," she shares of what the main issue was. "But the one thing for me was just the way that she could connect with what was going on in people that were watching the show. It was like, they're watching themselves, you know, and that was where they related. And so for me, it only makes sense to me to shoot a show where she's acting like a 30-year-old in a modern world. And there was a lot of creative discussions where maybe they were thinking that's not quite right, and we were trying to make it work. And, you know, there's always, like, lots of conversations, but I don't think it's going to be happening."

Duff shot two episodes of the reboot and shared how she felt stepping back into the beloved Disney Channel character, which she admitted she "couldn't stand" at one point in her life.

"It was lovely to relive that even for three weeks of my life, because, you know, there was a point in my life where I couldn't stand Lizzie McGuire," she says. "And I was like, 'I don't want to hear that name ever again.' And now that I'm my age, I'm like, I love her. She's, you know, this is where it all began for me. And she is me and I am her. And I brought what I could to that, which was very much just who I am inside. And so to tap into that again, even for a moment was really a great experience."

She also loved reuniting with her former co-stars.

"And to see a lot of the cast, the original cast, you know, we're different humans now," she notes. "It was just like, all love -- and it still is. And you never, never say never in this business. I always say that. ... Like, you never know what the day is going to bring. And that's kind of what this industry is, which keeps it really exciting."

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