Hilary Duff and Lalaine Fell Out Over 'Teen-Girl Drama' and Career Competition

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Tensions were so high, the show's final season ground to a halt, according to the new book 'Disney High'

Lizzie and Miranda’s friendship was a big part of what made Disney Channel’s Lizzie McGuire a hit with young fans in the early 2000s. But according to a new book, behind-the-scenes tensions between stars Hilary Duff and Lalaine ultimately led to the latter abruptly leaving the show.

In Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire, author Ashley Spencer writes that the two young actors became close in real life early in the show’s two-season run. Their characters’ close bond had Duff and Lalaine filming together constantly, while off-screen “they lived near each other and shared milestones like shaving their legs together for the first time,” Spencer writes.

“The two girls were literally best friends for three-quarters of the series, maybe more,” Lizzie McGuire showrunner Stan Rogow explains in the book. “And then they had a blow up that never got healed.”

Insiders told Spencer that tensions surfaced as early as season 1, when Lalaine got to show off her vocal prowess, singing “Reflection” from Disney’s Mulanin an episode.

“Hilary and her mom were very upset by that because their long-term plan was for Hilary to sing,” Tim Maile, who co-wrote the episode, says in Disney High. “And, in the overall scheme of Lizzie, Lalaine was the one who got to sing first.”

According to Spencer, Duff, whose busy schedule didn’t allow her to spend as much time with the rest of the show’s cast and crew, was also insecure about Lalaine’s apparent bond with everyone else on set.

“There were a lot of emotional politics that were just unfortunate,” Rogow says. “It was a mess.”

During the show’s final stretch of filming in 2002, Duff and Lalaine had what Spencer describes in the book as “a falling-out beyond repair.”

Rogow recalls that the actors’ friendship “fractured all the way up to the parents.”

“There were two camps: ‘We don’t want to work with her,’ and ‘We don’t want to work with her,’ ” he explains in the book. “It was like, oh my God, this is a nightmare. We couldn’t solve it.”

Spencer writes that the rift between Duff and Lalaine — which she chalks up to “typical teen-girl drama” as well as a stew of career and management issues — caused production of the show’s second season to halt. With just six episodes left to film, network execs decided to release Lalaine from her contract.

“We could never and would never force someone to do [a show they didn’t want to do],” former Disney Channel president of entertainment Rich Ross tells Spencer. “For Lalaine, she was ready to go.”

While Lalaine was absent from the final six episodes filmed, because they aired out of sequence, she did appear in several late season 2 episodes, including the final Lizzie McGuire episode to air on Disney Channel in February 2004. The show’s producers also intended to bring her back for season 2’s Christmas episode, which aired in December 2002, but filmed after Lalaine had left the show.

But, as Lizzie McGuire writer Douge Tuber says in Disney High, tensions between the two young actors once again flared during the episode’s table read. “You could tell there was something going on between the two of them. Lalaine was kind of strutting like, ‘I’m baaack,’ and Hilary didn’t like that,” Tuber says. “After the table read, Stan told us, ‘Well, she’s not going to be in this one either.’ So, we wrote her out.”