Hilary Duff Says She Was 'F—ing Done' With Lizzie McGuire

Hilary Duff has told Paper magazine she was finished with Lizzie McGuire by the time she shot the 2003 film — and for years refused to perform its signature song, "What Dreams Are Made Of."

"I was pretty done with Lizzie at that time," Duff said of filming The Lizzie McGuire Movie. "I had filmed 30 episodes one year and 35 episodes the next. I turned into a huge star. Everyone called me Lizzie. And then I went to Italy to film that movie, and I think I was just like, 'I'm fucking done with you.' I want people to see me. This isn't fun anymore."

The numbers back her up. Disney Channel ran her ragged: 65 episodes across two seasons, then a feature film shot in Italy. Duff was a teenager carrying a franchise while trying to build a separate identity as a recording artist.

She also could not legally claim the song she is now most associated with. "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."

What changed between then and now?

Duff re-recorded "What Dreams Are Made Of" for her 2026 "(Mine)" EP, seven newly cut versions of her greatest hits that first appeared as bonus tracks on vinyl variants of her "Luck… or Something" album. She then sang the song live for the first time on her "Small Rooms, Big Nerves" Tour this year.

"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," she told Paper. "I don't want to sound ungrateful for doing it, but at the time, I was pretty exhausted by it."

She was clear about the emotional distance she felt from the material at the time. "When I look back at that, I'm like, oh my god, I would love a redo," she said. "All of it was just so crazy. 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."

What does this change for the audience? It reframes a beloved Disney artifact as something its own star once resented — and her current tour as a public reconciliation with it, decades after the fact.

The series debuted on Disney Channel in January 2001 and ended in 2004, with Lalaine, Adam Lamberg, Jake Thomas, Hallie Todd and Robert Carradine in the cast alongside Duff. The 2003 film closed out the story.

Duff's reclamation of "What Dreams Are Made Of" now sits at the center of her touring setlist — proof that ownership, in pop as elsewhere, is something an artist can negotiate back.