In How I Met Your Father, Hilary Duff plays Sophie, a character perpetually mid-mess — and that’s the way she likes it. “She’s open to succeed and she’s open to fail,” Duff tells me. “And that’s a scary zone to live in.” Scary, yes. Relatable? Absolutely. Especially in a show that thrives on red herrings, timelines, and the slow-burn chaos of figuring it all out.
Back for a second season, Duff says the game is still the same — just a little messier. “We can’t get our sh*t together that quickly,” she laughs. “We’re trying to keep our TV show on the air, you know?” Sophie, she says, keeps marching forward even when she shouldn’t. “There’s definitely moments where someone should be like, ‘Girl, stay home. Give yourself a couple days.’ But she doesn’t.”
Of course, the shadow looming over the show is always How I Met Your Mother, which had nine years to play the long game. This one is still ramping up — and there are more father fakes than ever. “We heard on the very first episode, ‘Your father was in the room this night,’” Duff points out. “Now we’ve shot multiple flashbacks of different parts of that room that we didn’t see. I think they’re messing with all of us.”
As for the cast, even they’ve given up on trying to crack the mystery. “We’ve collectively just thrown our hands up. We’re like, well, we’ll find out when everybody else does. Or slightly before. Maybe.”
But while the search for Dad continues, Season 2 has a new weapon: celebrity cameos. Neil Patrick Harris. Meghan Trainor. Michael McDonald. Do they put together a wish list? “Jennifer Coolidge as Jesse and Ellen’s mom,” Duff fires back immediately, crediting co-star Tien Tran. “How genius would that be?”
The Meghan Trainor episode doubles as a bit of cross-promotional wizardry, dropping the same week the pop star announced her pregnancy. “I was like, Meghan! You marketing goddess, you get it,” Duff says. It also turns out Trainor had never acted in a TV show before. “She was really excited,” Duff says. “And it’s always nice when you can work with a friend.”
Speaking of working with friends, Duff’s musical past still peeks into the present. A recent episode had her sing her way out of a scene, but don’t call it a Lizzie McGuire moment. “I’m really not trying to sing as Hilary,” she says. “Sophie’s such a goofball, she tries and she fails. And this was one of those moments.”
Still, she’s in on the nostalgia. When the writers asked if they could use a Lizzie McGuire clip, she didn’t blink. “100 percent always inclusive of Lizzie,” she says. “It’s fun to play with my past.”
The show’s ties to How I Met Your Mother get deeper this season, too, especially with the return of Neil Patrick Harris. “He had four pages of dialogue. He just breezed through it in the most Barney slash NPH fashion,” Duff says. “He was so handsome and so charming and all the things.”
The goal, she says, is still to eventually bring back all of the original cast — just not all at once. “Doing it in a way that’s really smart and clever,” she adds.
The soundtrack also continues to be a lowkey secret weapon. “It’s sort of its own little character in this show,” Duff agrees. A cover of Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” plays during one scene, and “When a Man Loves a Woman” sets the mood elsewhere. Duff doesn’t get the music cues in advance — most of it is added in post — but the results are magic. “It just feels special,” she says. “Everyone’s department comes together like puzzle pieces.”
That includes choreography. Which is how she ended up spending part of a Sunday afternoon on YouTube, alone in her room, learning the Electric Slide for a scene. “Yes, really,” she admits. “Francia helped me with some of it, too. She’s the real dancer in the group.”
Duff shrugs off the time warp of it all — the callbacks, the throwbacks, the fact that it’s now somehow the 20th anniversary of her HitClips. “Don’t say 20 years ago,” she groans, mock-horrified.
But time travel is kind of her thing. Past and present blurring together, red herrings everywhere, timelines being finessed in post. Whether it’s Sophie hunting for a father, the writers pulling tricks, or Hilary Duff channeling the Lizzie of it all, the story still works. “It’s just so cool,” she says. “And also? A little intimidating. But in the best way possible.”
And if Season 3 does arrive? She’s ready. Electric Slide and all.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
