Hilary Duff was so burned out by the time she filmed “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” that she swore off the song from its big finale, “What Dreams Are Made Of.”
“I was pretty done with Lizzie at that time,” Duff said in a Paper magazine cover story published Oct. 26.
The Disney Channel series debuted in January 2001 and ran for 65 episodes. The movie reached theaters in May 2003, and the final episode aired in February 2004.
Why Hilary Duff swore off the song
Duff told Paper’s Jason Ve that the workload and the fame piled up fast. “I had filmed 30 episodes one year and 35 episodes the next. I turned into a huge star. Everyone called me Lizzie,” she said.
The movie shoot was where she hit her limit. “And then I went to Italy to film that movie, and I think I was just like, ‘I’m f—ing done with you.’ I want people to see me. This isn’t fun anymore,” she said.
She recalled being “14, maybe 15” and working on a tight clock. “They have me for this amount of hours, it’s a rush, there’s a body double,” Duff said. Looking back at the performance, she added, “I would love a redo.”
The song got caught up in her push to be seen as herself. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful for doing it, but at the time, I was pretty exhausted by it. 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,” she said.
The song she didn’t own
That last point wasn’t new. On the “Therapuss” podcast in November 2025, Duff said the song had always sat apart from her own catalog. “It wasn’t technically my song,” she said, calling it “a Lizzie McGuire song,” Elite Daily reported. If she ever toured again, she teased, she might “be allowed to manage to sing that song somehow, some way.”
Two months later, she did. Duff closed the Jan. 19 opener of her Small Rooms, Big Nerves Tour at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire with her first public performance of the song.
She also cut a new version for “(Mine),” a seven-song EP of re-recorded hits. The tracks began as vinyl bonus cuts for her album “Luck … or Something,” were gathered on silver vinyl for Record Store Day and reached streaming services May 29.
How Duff feels about it now
Time has changed what the song means to her. “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 said.
She told Paper the difference shows up onstage. “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,” she said.
What’s next
Duff released the holiday EP “Holiday Things” on Oct. 23, and her Lucky Me Tour continues with Canada and Mexico dates in January and February 2027. New dates in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. carry the run into November 2027.
Paper reported that she’s also planning more music and eyeing a return to acting, whether in a book adaptation, a limited series or a movie.
For more news on the artists you love, follow our music coverage.
Don't stop here
Every Score. Every Story. One Home.
Breaking sports, entertainment and news from across the Total Apex network, updated all day.
Get the Full Story →
