Hilary Duff Hollywood Life Interview and Photoshots

Hilary Duff was recently interviewed by Stephen Rebello for Hollywood Life.
on the subject Hilary Here and Now. The interview has been tried to present here...

• Hilary Here and Now

By Stephen Rebello

Singing in a moody minor key against the throbbing dance club grooves of her new CD, Hilary Duff doesn’t sound anywhere near as upbeat and squeaky-clean as she’s been accused of being. With a breathy vocal delivery full of self-revealing emotion, she covers the angst-ridden territory of romantic disappointment, isolation and fear of intimacy. Whatever became of the princess of perk who lit up the hit TV series Lizzie McGuire, sold three platinum pop CDs, and made big-screen bonbons like A Cinderella Story and The Perfect Man? Oh, right, that was so yesterday.

It isn’t like anybody listening to Duff’s new CD is going to say that the 19-year-old has suddenly veered down the boulevard of broken dreams into the brand of brutally confessional music sung by Joni Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette or even Avril Lavigne. But Duff’s change in tone is pronounced enough to make you think that, even as we’re being invited to righteously shake our booties, we’re also getting a bulletin from the singer-songwriter that there are perils to being young, pretty, famous, successful on several fronts and rich.

“My heart does go out to Britney–she has an awful lot to deal with. I remember when all that stuff came out about her not strapping her baby in the car seat right. I was just like, ‘Leave her alone.’ My mom said to me, ‘Do you know how many times I dropped you on your head or let you fall off something accidentally?’ It just happens.”

At the Brentwood mansion where she’s doing a glam photo shoot, Duff works for the camera with professionalism and good humor, dutifully striking a series of poses and moods in different outfits, letting the small army of makeup artists, stylists, lighting experts and personal handlers carry out their missions on and about her person. The difference in Duff is not just the music. There’s her new look. She’s very slim and very brunette these days, and the angles and planes of her face have taken on definition. She’s begun to look more womanly, and at the same time more waif-ish and vulnerable.

The surface change has been accompanied by certain seismic shifts in the life of the Houston-born Duff. Last year she ended a several-year relationship with Good Charlotte singer Joel Madden, who quickly moved on to squire Nicole Richie around quite prominently. Duff ’s only public romance before Madden had had its own hurtful aspect and unhappy ending. Teen pop idol Aaron Carter, who reportedly dumped Lindsay Lohan for Duff, publicly apologized, after his year-plus relationship with Duff had been over for some time, for cheating on Duff with one of her close friends.

There has been professional as well as personal disappointment. After initially enjoying success with films like Cheaper By the Dozen and A Cinderella Story, Duff had much less success with Raise Your Voice, The Perfect Man and Material Girls, which all bombed with both audiences and critics.

Overall, though, most of the changes Hilary Duff has been going through are steps up. Way up, in fact. Duff was the youngest person to make Rolling Stone’s 2006 list of top moneymakers, with a reported take of $17.1 million. With her new CD, Dignity, already atop the charts, she will kick off a summer concert tour of the U.S., Canada and Europe. She also has two movies due out this year, one of them an unexpected and promising project–a satire of American imperialism and commercialism co-written and directed by John Cusack. She stars with Cusack, Sir Ben Kingsley and Marisa Tomei.

Even after the tiring hours of her photo session, Duff is frien-
dly and willing to take on the rigors of a lengthy interview. When I begin by telling her, “I detect more than a little discontent and anxiety in your new CD,” her face lights up as if she’s getting a second wind. “I’m really glad you noticed that,” she says, smiling, sitting very still, looking pretty and poised, and searching my eyes for any telltale signs of a journalist’s mockery or manipulation. She won’t find any.

“That’s kind of the feel of this record for me,” she continues. “This is the first time I wrote a record by myself. I mean, I had help from one other person, but every song has a really kind of deep meaning to me. It’s not message music, but it’s personal. I didn’t do them with a serious, dramatic track, but they still mean a lot to me.”

Duff’s 2003 smash Metamorphosis had hit singles like “So Yesterday” and “Come Clean” that helped spark an entirely sold-out concert tour. Writing and recording in a more perso-nal vein than her earlier albums was a gamble. “It was scary at first,” she says, with a catch in her voice that suggests she isn’t kidding. “I’ve been in the business most of my life. You get to a point where you learn to only show people what you want them to talk about or see. If there’s something going on in your family that you don’t want the whole world to know about, you hide it and lie about it. The same if you’re seeing someone. It had gotten so that I would really think about everything that came out of my mouth, knowing that it could get twisted into this, that or whatever. You really close yourself up, and when you talk or do an interview, you turn into someone you don’t know. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just that you don’t want people to know everything about you. When I started writing this record, I couldn’t help but write about things that affected me. Some of the songs were so honest that I was like, ‘Do I really want people to know this?’ Finally, I just thought, ‘Who am I kidding? All it’s going to do is make people see that I’m a human.’”

Duff has been in the spotlight since she was 10, and she has an older sister, Haylie, who’s famous, too (for 7th Heaven and Napoleon Dynamite). Unsurprisingly, then, she has the paparazzi on high alert to see whether or not she’ll become another club-hopping, wild-child celebrity train wreck. When I ask her if she feels like she’s living in a fishbowl, she responds, “I don’t know what it’s like not to deal with people watching what I do, but it’s funny that you use the word ‘fishbowl’ because that’s exactly what I say. My sister and I have our own private signal of ‘Here we are again, living in a fishbowl.’” She demonstrates by puffing out her eyes and cheeks like a ticked-off blowfish. “It’s somewhat humorous, but it’s also unnatural and weird.”

Considering how she feels about drawing the wrong kinds of attention to herself, one wonders whether Duff has ever considered dating guys who have a lower public profile than her ex, Madden. “I had such a great relationship for two and a half years,” she says. “When we broke up, it was just kind of time. I’d been in a relationship with him for so long. I’m just too young. I love him. He’s really a great person.” As for watching his very public follow-up romance with Nicole Richie, she says quietly, “We were not a couple who would go out and be seen together. On the red carpet, I’d go in first and he’d go in second. If we were at my house and went out for a walk to Coffee Bean and photographers were there, he would walk across the street so we wouldn’t be in the same shot. But because we wouldn’t give people anything, they started saying so many things that were untrue or just nasty. You’re in a lose-lose situation. But it would have been cheesy to be a couple that just loves to go out and get photographed. That was not our thing. So you do wonder why they do it now when they were so against it before? You’re like, wait–were you really that person who didn’t like that public lifestyle or was I just a fool? But I broke up with Joel and when I decided that breaking up was the right decision, I had to think through all the things I was going to have to deal with. One of them was seeing him with someone else. It’s definitely difficult to see him move on so quickly.”

Since Duff is as much a part of Young Hollywood as Britney, Lindsay, Paris and others who’ve publicly gone off the rails and been hounded by the press while they were at it, I ask her if she feels empathy for them. She ponders this a while, then finally says, “Some people I feel more sorry for than others. For some reason–and I don’t know if it’s just because I don’t want to be like that–I’ve stayed out of all that stuff, far away from it. I don’t want to be that person who shows up in those types of magazines and newspapers all the time, and some of that is avoidable. My heart does go out to Britney–she has an awful lot to deal with. I remember when all that stuff came out about her not strapping her baby in the car seat right. I was just like, ‘Leave her alone.’ My mom said to me, ‘Do you know how many times I dropped you on your head or let you fall off something accidentally?’ It just happens.”

After all not oonly the interview, these are the beautiful Pictures shot for the show...