Hilary Duff‘s two worlds collided in the March 7 episode How I Met Your Father, which featured a callback to her days on Lizzie McGuire. During the episode, Hilary’s Sophie recalls her worst Valentine’s Day experience, which turns out to be from the beloved Disney Channel show, as footage plays of Hilary’s Lizzie flirting on the phone with her boyfriend Ronnie, in the Lizzie McGuire episode “First Kiss.”
Sadly, the Lizzie McGuire flashback was short-lived, since Sophie’s friends stop her from continuing the story. The brief glimpse at Hilary’s days on Lizzie McGuire was such a welcome surprise for fans, since the planned reboot was scrapped by Disney+.
So, are you wondering how that Lizzie McGuire cameo scene cameo to be? HIMYF executive producers Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker told Entertainment Weekly the episode’s writer, Amy-Jo Perry, came up with the idea, and they immediately reached out to Hilary about it.
“We all loved it, but the first thing we had to do was immediately fire off a text to Hilary and be like, ‘How do you feel about this?’ ” Elizabeth said. “And she’s the best — if she thinks it’s funny, she totally is on board. It took her all of 10 seconds to be like, ‘Yes, obviously, we have to do that,’ ” she added.
Isaac revealed to EW that they didn’t have to get permission to use the Lizzie McGuire footage “because Lizzie was a Disney Channel show and we work for Walt Disney Television, so it’s all the same big corporate umbrella. That makes it all very, very seamless.”
As for the Lizzie McGuire reboot that never happened, Elizabeth said that the cameo scene in the How I Met Your Mother spinoff series gave fans “a tiny taste of what they didn’t get with that reboot.” She added, “We just try and give everybody every experience they can ever dream of. That was really fun to do.”
Lizzie McGuire aired on Disney Channel from 2001 to 2004 and also spawned the 2003 theatrical film The Lizzie McGuire Movie. A reboot series was in the works on Disney+ back in 2020, starring Hilary and the original cast. Two episodes were filmed, before the project was scrapped when Hilary and Disney disagreed with the direction they wanted to take her character in.