Hilary Duff

  1. Lindsey Lohan, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, 2003. Disney went from its own Duff to the duff Lohan for this project aimed at 7-12-year-old girls. With a title to haunt Lohan’s tabloid future.
  2. Lindsay Lohan, Freaky Friday, 2003.   Lohan strikes again…!   . Far from chuffed, Duff immediately told her Lizzie McGuire TV team to “get freaky.” The writers came up with a copycat Lizzie episode, with Liz and brother Matt swopping bodies. And she beat Lohan to the screen by 13 months. Those Freaky McGuires aired on June 28, 2002, the movie opened August 6, 2003. Disney was sitting pretty. It produced both.
  3. Amber Tamblyn, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, 2005.     Too young! Director Ken Kwapis chose Russ Tamblyn’s daughter to the Disney’s teen TV queen – four years younger.
  4. Shenae Grimes, 90210, TV, 2008.      The Disney-trained Duff was first offered the part of Annie Wilson but knew a stinker when she read it. Grimes took over in what British TV critic Hermnone Eyre called “glassy-eyed social pornography, obsessed with looks, things, and money.”
  5. Malin Åkerman, Watchmen, 2008.   Not so much “Who watches the watchmen?” as Juvenal asked, but who them playeth? As Alan Moore’s forcibly retired superheroes were called back to duty in an alternate 1985 America – Duff, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Connelly, Jamie Lee Curtis, Hilary Duff, Milla Jovovich, Hilary Swank were up for Laurie Jupiter, aka Silk Spectre II. Cast included actors playing Brezhnev, Castro, JFK and Jackie, Kissinger, Nixon, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol…
  6. Emma Stone, The Amazing Spider-Man, 2010.
  7. Elizabeth Olsen, Godzilla, 2013.    Duff, Emilia Clarke, Jennifer Lawrence, Aly Michalka, Imogen Poots, Margot Robbie and Emmy Rossum were up for Elle Brody (a nod to Roy Scheider’s Jaws sheriff?). But UK director Gareth Edwards said he got all his first choices for his second feature. It won him his third, the superb  Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 2015.
  8. Holliday Grainer, Bonnie & Clyde, TV, 2013.  After five years as Disney’s Hannah Montana, Cyrus was the hot favourite for Bonnie Parker in the cockeyed two-parter about the murderous 1930s bank robbers.Then, she wasn’t…  Texan Hilary Duff was booked to join Canadian Kevin Zegers as Clyde –  until they became Utah’s Lindsay Pulsipher and Houston’s Sean Faris… and, finally, the British Grainger and Californian Emile Hirsch. Nothing made us forget Dunaway!

 

 Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls:  8