Hilary Duff wasn’t laughing along with fans at the With Love memes.
In a new interview with Glamour, Duff, 38, shared that she didn’t see the 2007 The Tonight Show performance the way fans do.
"That has not been a fun thing to follow me around. [I] didn’t want to be there, doing this dance that I probably didn’t want to be doing, and didn’t feel good at the time," the A Cindrella Story star said.
"I know people don’t look at it like that, and it’s this funny thing, but that’s how I used to look at it," she added.
She also reflected on her general image in the 2000s.
"I’ll say that I didn’t ever feel ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and it was funny that I was flagged as the good girl because of what people saw me doing on TV or that I wasn’t overtly sexual," she shared. "I was a totally normal teenager doing normal teenager things."
The Lizzie McGuire star said she’s now very much ok with fans embracing the song.
In 2021, she even posted a duet with a fan who used the original footage to dance along the song.
Duff, who’s focused on her acting career for the past decade, also shared why she decided to return to music.
"I just felt really ready to share. One, I wanted to stretch creatively, and two, I wanted to make something that I could connect with people again on the level of who I am now. I felt like people have definitely gone through some of the similar large strokes that I have in the past 10 to 15 years," she said.
Duff’s last studio album, Breathe In. Breathe Out., was released on June 12, 2015. Her new album, luck… or something, will be released on February 20.