As a female millennial, I thought of little else during the year 2003 than the simmering feud between up-and-comng actress-slash-pop-stars Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff (which was, of course, linked to the fact that they both dated Aaron Carter. Were we ever so young?).
The teen-queen duo’s falling out was very much giving proto-Lorde and Charli XCX—it really was the two of them on a coin the industry loved to spend!—and on the latest episode of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, Duff shed some light on her and Lohan’s eventual reconciliation:
Not only did Duff and Lohan settle their score in the most aughts way possible (with shots! At a club! I have to imagine it was bottle service at, like, Les Deux, no?), but I also learned from Duff’s appearance on Call Her Daddy that while they were on the outs, she even went so far as to show up only semi-invited to the 2003 premiere of Lohan’s film Freaky Friday.
Duff swears that costar Chad Michael Murray asked her to come to the Freaky Friday premiere, but she also confirms that she did kind of intentionally crash the event, telling Cooper of Lohan: “That was my childhood nemesis.” My own childhood nemesis was the gym teacher who sent a note home to my parents because I coudn’t properly do a jumping jack, so all I can say about this revelation is…how fab.
I’m glad that there doesn’t seem to be any residual animosity between Duff and Lohan, who are both grown-ups and mothers now (indeed, Duff says her seven-year-old daughter is a “Lindsay Lohan stan”), but in this age of feuds reported by DeuxMoi and interpersonal celebrity drama confined to the DMs, I can’t help being nostalgic for the days when two teen icons could meet up, take a shot, bury the hatchet, and…probably compare notes about all the bullshit they endured in pre-#MeToo Hollywood.