Hilary Duff needed a lot of luck to get through Sean Evans’ Hot Ones challenge, on which the singer-actress looked back on her Lizzie McGuire days and spoke about the challenges of returning to music while struggling through an array of increasingly spicy chicken wings.
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In the episode posted Thursday (March 26), Duff coughed, cried, sniffled and lost her train of thought a few different times while battling the Hot Ones sauces, but she still managed to share which elements of her actual adolescent life paralleled what her iconic character was going through on Lizzie McGuire in real time. The main one? “Bra shopping,” she told Evans without hesitation.
“I think a lot of the themes of the episodes were actually happening in my life as well — social dynamics and stuff within my friend groups outside of work,” Duff continued. “It’s so nice to hear people’s experience with the show or, like, how it helped them or formed them. Whether it be, like, her style or not quite fitting in anywhere. And I also kind of resonate with that. I feel like a very big dork, dressed in a cool girl’s outfit a lot of the time.”
More than two decades after the Disney Channel show wrapped in 2004, Duff said she still feels like a child star at heart as she embarks on her musical comeback. Ten years after her last LP, the performer finally dropped a new album — Luck … or Something, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — in February, but promoting the project has looked a lot different from when she first began releasing music in the 2000s.
“The fact that I have many, many memories of being at TRL is a part of my personality,” Duff told Evans. “There would be the same song on the TRL charts for, like, weeks after weeks after weeks after weeks. And can you imagine kids dealing with that kind of length in this day and age?”
“But I’m also loving a TikTok trend,” she added. “Actually, my hair and makeup [team], they’re dear friends of mine, and they’ll be like, ‘This is the trend we’re doing today,’ and I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll do anything!’ I’m still a child actor inside, wanting to please.”
By the end of the episode, Duff was fully in tears, at one point calling the tactile experience of the spice in her mouth a “hellhole.” Before she left, however, she made sure to call out her upcoming Lucky Me world tour, which kicks off in June and runs through next February.
Watch Duff’s full episode of Hot Ones above.
