Christy Carlson Romano Says Shia LaBeouf Trash-Talked 'Lizzie McGuire' on Set

Christy Carlson Romano says Shia LaBeouf trash-talked "Lizzie McGuire" while the two filmed Disney Channel's "Even Stevens," and that he was "definitely beefing" with the rival show's star, Hilary Duff.

Romano made the claim on a recent episode of "The Joe Vulpis Podcast." "Hilary had no clue about that. I'm sure she was doing her own thing, but he would always be kind of like trash-talking 'Lizzie McGuire,'" Romano said. "I was always like, 'We don't know anything about them. Like why are you…'" She added that LaBeouf was "very competitive."

"He wanted to be the number one show on the network," Romano said. "He had to be the number one show because I think his life depended on that show doing well… He had a rough upbringing, and I think he needed that show to do well for him."

What drove the rivalry?

Earlier in the podcast episode, Romano explained that the actors held no grudge against rival performers at Nickelodeon. The real competition ran inside Disney Channel itself, where shows fought for the best ratings.

The two leads were 14 and 12 years old at the time. Last month, ahead of the release of her memoir, "Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star," Romano said on another podcast that she and LaBeouf were "like oil and water" on set.

Romano traced their incompatibility to how each child was raised. "I was being raised and brought up to be this type A, I mean exactly like Ren Stevens. Like, you know your lines, you hit your marks, you don't mess up," she said. "You're a New York kid, like that comes with a certain echelon… I was trying to go to pre-college Juilliard… everything we were doing, my mom called it cross-training, came with a certain dollar amount of training."

Two childhoods, one soundstage

LaBeouf has long spoken openly about his tumultuous childhood. He has said his father was a recovering addict and at times abusive.

"He was a Venice Beach kind of bum kid," Romano said. "It's like that kind of vagrant fun, but also very chaotic and very scary lifestyle, and he was very young to be having that." She likened his upbringing to the world depicted in Larry Clark's 1995 film "Kids."

Romano later starred alongside Hilary Duff in the Disney Channel original movie "Cadet Kelly." Duff, for her part, was unaware of any friction, according to Romano.

What does this change for the record on child stardom? Romano's account, arriving alongside her memoir, frames the "Even Stevens" set as a collision between a polished professional childhood and a precarious one — a contrast she now presents as the engine behind LaBeouf's relentless competitiveness on the network that made them both famous.