How I Met Your Father showrunners reveal how that Lizzie McGuire cameo came about
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Warning: This article contains mild spoilers about Tuesday's episode of How I Met Your Father.
The Lizzie McGuire revival never happened (and no, we're still not over it!), but Hilary Duff's iconic teen character was still brought back to TV recently thanks to How I Met Your Father.
In Tuesday's clip show episode, "A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Valentine's Day," the How I Met Your Mother spin-off aired a short flashback scene of what Sophie (Duff) calls her worst Valentine's Day experience, and the show used footage from the actor's former Disney Channel comedy where Lizzie (a young Duff) flirts on the phone with her first boyfriend Ronnie (Joe Rokicki). Sophie's friends don't let her continue telling her story, but if they had, she likely would have revealed that Ronnie broke her heart when he dumped her to date a girl at his own school instead (which is how the Lizzie McGuire episode, "First Kiss," ended).
Showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger tell EW that the idea to use old footage from Lizzie McGuire on Duff's new comedy came straight from the episode's writer, Amy-Jo Perry. "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?'" Berger says. "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.'"
Aptaker reveals that they didn't have to get any other special permissions to use the footage either. "It's so easy because Lizzie was a Disney Channel show and we work for Walt Disney Television, so it's all the same big corporate umbrella," he says. "That makes it all very, very seamless."
Once they got Duff's approval for the idea, it was time to hunt down the right scene to use. "It was just us combing through and finding the clip that made sense for the episode," Berger says. "But as soon as we heard the idea, everyone got on board immediately. It was a very easy creative process."
Both showrunners laugh at how using Lizzie McGuire footage is their way of giving fans some kind of justice after the Disney+ revival was scrapped in 2020. "Yeah, we can give people a tiny taste of what they didn't get with that reboot," Berger says. "We just try and give everybody every experience they can ever dream of. That was really fun to do."
How I Met Your Father season 2 debuts new episodes Tuesdays on Hulu.
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