I’m waking up to a dream sequence. Her team told me this would be audio only because of her frenetic travel schedule. She’d just landed in Auckland for the New Zealand and Australia leg of her tour. Then the name Hilary pops up on the Zoom, she turns on her camera, and I see the most bubbly ball of energy, with her long, sun-streaked locks in loose waves. I freak out. The camera stays on for the whole hour, and it feels like chatting with a bestie. She’s completely locked in, letting her hair down, and I get to ask her all the questions I’ve always dreamt about asking her, probably on behalf of all the fans of our generation who grew up with her.
Though technically, this is our second meeting. In 2014, I brought a first date to her “All About You” premiere, crashed her step-and-repeat pretending to be press, and had him snap our photos. When he asked to see me again, I apparently replied, “can you send me my photos with Hilary?”
Back then, I had no idea the girl in my photos was, in her words, “hanging on by a thread.” Now, more than a decade later, she’s pulled off the pop comeback of the year. Her album luck… or something debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, her highest-charting album since 2007, and she’s played 50 shows so far, many of which sold out in hours. She’s already done New York and London, two cities straight out of “Wake Up,” and Paris is coming in May. Maybe Tokyo? Her crowds are full of the same queer kids from 2004, now adults in butterfly clips and baggy jeans. (She’s been a ride or die for our community since her iconic “That’s So Gay” PSA.) And let’s be clear, she’s not a nostalgia act. Everyone in the audience knows the new album too.
The thing about Hilary is that she was one of the biggest child stars of a generation, and that didn’t come with any guarantee she’d come out the other side in one piece. Playing Lizzie McGuire gave her everything and took a lot out of her. She remembers thinking, “I’m fucking done with you. I want people to see me.” She adds, “It was so weird being a child star and trying to cross that bridge into adulthood, being taken seriously, coming off Disney Channel.” She yearned to break free from a character that never grew up.
And she did. Hilary is proof the role that made you doesn’t have to be the one that defines you.
On her own terms, she made the most honest album of her career, about marriage, desire and the parts of growing up nobody warns you about. She let us into the messy, complicated parts, and we saw ourselves in them. Today, she finally feels the respect from the industry, including from people she felt were hard to please her entire career. Hilary thought she was healing herself, but in the process, she healed us too.
She’s also made peace with the internet turning her most earnest moments, like the “With Love” dance and that PSA, into memes. The gays turned them into camp classics, out of love. “Now I’m like, oh, got it,” she says. “I can play along, too.”
Is it luck? She’d say so. But a lot of it is something of her own: smart decisions, and the family she built, which gave her the foundation to say, “I don’t give a fuck.”
“I really do mean it to inspire people who feel stuck, or who haven’t done something they wanted to,” she says. And she’s not done. She’s already planning more music as she takes the tour around the world, and she’s eyeing a return to acting, whether a book adaptation, a limited series or a movie. “Now that I know that I can.”
