Not necessarily Younger, but considerably wiser! Back when she was an underage Disney star, Hilary Duff would get into clubs with the help of her big sister Haylie Duff, plus a few other fibs here and there.
In TV Land’s new show Younger, Duff plays Kelsey Peters, whose colleague Liza Miller (Sutton Foster) lies about her age to land an editorial gig, noted to TIME that she’s done it herself. “Of course! All the time,” Duff, now 27, noted. “I used to lie about my age to get into clubs and stuff… but I think they would all know how old I was anyway. I was pretty well-known by the time I was trying to get into clubs, and they would just let me in anyway.”
She jokingly bragged that “it wasn’t hard” for herself to get into Hollywood’s hottest spots. “I knew most of the people,” she shared, noting: “I’m not trying to sound like a brat or anything!”
Duff’s big sister helped out too. “She learned the ropes for me and then I got to just sneak in,” the Lizzie McGuire alum dished. “Super naughty! Naughty, naughty. A fake ID would never work for me because they’d be like, ‘We know who you are.’ I think I had my sister’s old ID.”
17325 hilary duff in 2004
While Duff missed out on being a typical 20-something (paging Zayn!), the star said she’s catching up now, through her character in Younger. “That’s part of why it was exciting for me to take this role,” she explained. “I do feel like she’s just totally normal and relatable, but she’s driven, she’s smart and she’s got it together. And then she can also be a total disaster. That’s pretty much how women roll right now in their 20s and early 30s. They want the best of both worlds, and they’re willing to deal with the hangovers or the pain of going out and partying the night before.”
In fact, her character’s antics are far from tame. “When I read the episode about my character’s DivaCup getting stuck, that was like, ‘Wow, okay, we’re really going to go there,'” she told TIME. “That was exciting. We get drunk a lot. We take Molly.”
Even acting out as a crazy 20-something is tough, according to Duff. “It’s exhausting to act drunk or high all day! It’s a lot of work, but it is fun,” she reflected. “And it was nice because we filmed it toward the end of the season, so we were all just being wild… Oh, our wrap party was pretty wild. People were pulling all-nighters.”
The writers, most of whom are in their 20s and “know what’s up,” will oftentimes surprise her, too. “Sometimes I’m reading the script and I’m like, what? People do that?” she said. “I am in my 20s, but I have a lot of responsibility in my life.”
Indeed, she does. Duff recently filed for divorce from her husband Mike Comrie, with whom she shares a 3-year-old son, Luca. While her life is in transition, Duff maintained that she’s lucky to have fun costars in Foster, Debi Mazur, and Nico Tortorella. “It depends on the day and how much coffee we’ve all had or how late we’re working that night, but we can get pretty rowdy!” she said. “We really got along so great. We’re all very different, but I think we love and respect each other and learn from each other too.”
