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More Than ‘Luck’: How Hilary Duff Became An Arena Pop Star — and Bigger Than Ever
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“I’d only gotten two hours of sleep, and it was like, ‘Help me, please,’ ” she recalls. “My husband grabbed my pillow, my blanket, blasted sound machines, gave me an eye mask, gave me earplugs, put headphones on top of the earplugs and was like, ‘I will keep the kids away from you. Don’t come out of here for six hours, because you have a show tonight.’ ”
Hilary Duff will sit down for an exclusive conversation at the 2026 Billboard Live Music Summit, where she will receive the Outstanding Pop Tour of the Year Award.
Nearly 25 years into her musical career, Duff is no stranger to life on the road. But until her zeitgeist-capturing Lucky Me Tour this past summer, she’d never brought her husband and kids along for the ride. The ongoing run is supporting her February album, Luck … Or Something, a surprise hit after Duff’s 11-year break from music that reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200. With its tight 37 minutes of catchy, clever and often genuinely deep bops, it proved she still has serious pop cachet to spare. The album currently has 411.4 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate.
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The Lucky Me Tour is also a smash, having grossed $48.3 million from 610,000 tickets sold through its first 40 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore. In late September, Duff announced 32 more dates in arenas across Europe, Latin America and the United States that will run from May to November 2027. “I don’t think anyone knew this was going to be what it turned into,” she says, “but I am also not naive in a way of thinking this could have never happened. I have had a huge touring business before.”
While it’s been nearly 20 years since she’s toured, what’s happening on The Lucky Me Tour is far more than a comeback: It’s her biggest tour ever, and one with which she’s redefining her career, evolving her identity and giving a master class on how a millennial pop star can grow up with her audience. “Life has been very good to me, and also very challenging at times,” she says. “Having that mixed bag of life underneath my belt has [created] who I am onstage now. A big draw for me has always been being able to relate to people, and I find that’s happening again this time around — but in a very new way.”
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Even those who didn’t watch the Disney Channel in the early 2000s likely know who Duff is. The Houston native was 14 years old when she began playing Lizzie McGuire on the hit Disney Channel show of the same name. The program ran from 2001 to 2003 and made Duff the kind of archetypal Disney Channel star who — like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato after her — could transition from beloved tween TV actress to movie star (with 2003’s The Lizzie McGuire Movie and more) to chart-topping pop singer.
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But unlike some of her peers, she made this transition look painless. Hits like “Come Clean” (memorably used in the opening credits of canonical ’00s MTV reality show Laguna Beach), “Wake Up,” “So Yesterday” and “With Love” are imprinted on the psyches of any Y2K-era TRL-watcher, and two of the albums these songs came from — 2003’s Metamorphosis and 2005’s Most Wanted — both hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Between 2003 and 2008, Duff’s tours grossed $102.3 million and sold 1.9 million tickets over 208 reported shows.
Yet despite these eye-popping numbers, along with a catalog that now has 1.3 billion official on-demand global streams, Duff says she long felt like she wasn’t taken seriously. While she says she’s “for sure” noticed a marked change now, “I think I’ll always kind of deal with that syndrome. I think it’s just part of my DNA.”
Jill Sander dress, Misho earrings.Gleeson Paulino
Duff was 20 when the Dignity tour ended in early 2008 — and while she did release another album in 2015 (Breathe In. Breathe Out.), she didn’t tour behind it. “I was just overwhelmed and tired and wanting to like, form as a person,” she says today, curled up on a couch at a studio space in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. She turned 39 a few days ago and is singularly beautiful, with a smattering of tattoos (a tiny wish bone, a red heart, the word “Luca” for her son and first child) on her lower arms and wrists and what is certainly the largest diamond I’ve ever seen IRL on her ring finger.
During her nearly two decades off the road and 11 away from music, Duff created a different kind of life for herself. She got married, had her first child in 2012 and got divorced four years later, by which time she’d begun a starring role in the comedy-drama series Younger, which ran for seven seasons. In 2019, Duff married the man who gave her the ring, musician Matthew Koma — who has worked with stars including Shania Twain and Britney Spears and co-wrote Zedd’s Grammy-winning hit “Clarity” — with whom she now has three daughters: Banks, Mae and Townes.
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From 2022 to 2023, Duff also starred in two seasons of How I Met Your Father. But beyond this, she was living the ordinary life of an L.A. mom, driving her kids between school, soccer practice, dance rehearsals and home — a different kind of childhood than the one she had on soundstages and red carpets, in recording studios and tour buses. More than once in our conversation, she refers to herself as a “Disney dog” who still can’t totally shake her childhood training to “say yes and to go, go, go.”
In 2025, Duff and Koma wrote Luck … Or Something together as she explored an urge to make and release music again, this time from the perspective of a woman in her late 30s grappling with the same issues experienced by many of her peers: challenging family relationships, unnerving exes, nostalgia for your carefree 20s. It certainly resonated: Released in early November on her new label, Atlantic Records — where she was one of label head Elliot Grainge’s first major signings after he took the reins in late 2024 — the album’s lead single, “Mature,” received breathless praise. The internet celebrated Duff’s frank, acerbic assessment of an older man she used to date and his new girlfriend who looks “like she could be your daughter/Like me before I got smarter” — and by the time the album was announced in late November, it felt like Duff was building real buzz for a promising 2026.
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Anna Quan top, Anna October bra, LELET earrings.Gleeson Paulino
Behind the scenes, she and her team were asking the obvious next question: Could she also reclaim the road? To figure it out, she started small. In mid-November 2025, her Small Rooms, Big Nerves mini-tour went on sale, with dates at 2,500-ish-capacity rooms in London, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It sold out immediately, with tickets on the resale market going for upwards of $1,400.
“It was 100% market testing,” says Ben Buchanan, one of Duff’s agents at CAA. He and her team had sensed there was demand, especially after a video of Duff’s cameo as Role Model’s “Sally” during his 2025 Austin City Limits set went viral. The data on the Small Rooms, Big Nerves shows, he says, “was insane.”
“It was so funny to watch the internet stir with like, ‘She can do bigger venues than this,’ ” Duff says. That was true, but before she went out on the early-2026 run, she needed to get her confidence back. During an intimate friends and family performance at an L.A. soundstage in early January, she was so nervous that her hand shook holding the microphone.
After this show, Duff says her son — who’s now 14, the age Duff was when her career exploded — “was like, ‘Hey, I’m really proud of you. That had to feel really scary after such a long time.’ That stuck with me, because it is scary and I’m used to being so tough and strong. This industry really makes you very rough around the edges, where you’re like, ‘I’ve got to handle this, so I just will.’ But it was scary to step onstage after 20 years and figure out my identity, and how I move my body and what I’m taking from my old persona and adding to who I am now. It was a complicated thing to do, and I had to get over quite a few scars from the past.”
She was also apprehensive about completely upending her family’s routines — so she and Koma sat down for “a really serious conversation about what our life was going to look like introducing a world tour to our family.” She cried “a bunch” as she grappled with how long she’d be away and how much she’d miss her kids. But simultaneously, Duff was considering the kid she’d once been: “It was like, ‘I’m also doing something that’s part of my soul and the only thing I’ve really known since being a child.’ ”
By the end of their heart-to-heart, she and Koma decided that she’d go for it.
On Feb. 12, eight days before the release of Luck … Or Something, Duff announced The Lucky Me Tour, a 28-date summer amphitheater and arena run that included stops at Madison Square Garden in New York and the L.A.-area Kia Forum. With her most recent NYC show prior to this being for roughly 6,000 (at Radio City Music Hall), selling 28,100 tickets over two nights at the Garden marked a major leap in her touring stature. According to her CAA representatives, there were more than 1.5 million individual sign-ups for the tour’s presale, with second shows in multiple markets added almost immediately.
“You don’t always know where you are in the middle,” says Brian Manning, another agent on Duff’s CAA team, “but you know when you’re white-hot, and every indicator said this was about to be white-hot.”
Before holding any dates, Duff, her team at Watchdog Management and her agents had plotted out routing that would work around her family’s schedule. The tour’s longest stretch of shows happened over the summer, when the kids — now 14, 8, 5 and 2 — weren’t in school. They loved being on the road, happily gathering the butterfly confetti off venue floors after each show, while Duff candidly reports, straight-faced, that “it was a really fun summer, and I never want to do it again.” (Though she toured with nannies, Duff admits that ultimately “kids want their mom.”)
Buchanan says this past summer’s leg will be the longest she’ll do over the tour’s two years; beyond that, her itinerary will be structured in “very bite-sized chunks so she’s not away from home for extended periods of time.” This fall, that’s meant two weeks in New Zealand and Australia, two weeks back in the United States before the holidays, then two weeks in Canada and so on into 2027. (When we speak in late September, Duff has already carved pumpkins with the kids, since she won’t be around in the run-up to Halloween — though she acknowledges too that time at home doesn’t always equate to time off, since it is often occupied by “fittings and photo shoots and interviews and radio station visits.”)
But the stage now feels more like her home too — one that, this time around, she had a larger role than ever in creating. “It was wonderful building this on my terms,” she says. “I don’t mean that negatively in regard to how anything was handled in the past, because I was a child in the past. I wasn’t muted and I got to make decisions, but people made a lot of decisions for me because I didn’t care or know enough to be like, ‘Here’s how I want this.’ ”
She knows now. “I wanted the show to have levels and those levels being my return to music,” she says. As such, the show’s first act features a supercut tracking her rise as a child star. She then gets more into adulthood through what she calls the “slumber party vibes drinking wine with your girlfriends” segment during which she sits on a couch in cozy pajama bottoms and a T-shirt sipping a rotating assortment of alcoholic beverages (each night’s drink is a surprise) and singing songs including “We Don’t Talk” and “Come Clean.”
Gleeson Paulino
While she initially imagined doing the entire show barefoot, “Eventually I was like, ‘Get it together, Hilary. Put your heels on and be a pop star.’ ” She certainly has a pop star presence, looking relaxed onstage and like she’s having as much or more fun as anyone else in the room as she’s performing. She even pokes a little fun at herself, performing 2007’s “With Love” with the choreography that became an internet “go girl, give us nothing” meme over the last few years after a clip of her performing the song on the Today show in 2007 went viral. (This time around, she’s throwing her hips into the moves a bit more.)
To show fans what she’d been up to in her time away from the spotlight, the last act starts with a supercut of Duff, Koma and their kids sledding, riding bikes, playing at the beach and generally just being a normal (if particularly well-traveled) family. “We have the opportunity to have grown and keep growing,” she says in the video’s voice-over, commenting on her time off, her return, how the first helped facilitate the latter and also offering a thesis statement for the show, for the album, this era of her life in total and, arguably, for her audience’s lives in this moment as well. The show then ends with “another big, in-your-face celebration” in which she performs career-bookending bangers “Mature” and “What Dreams Are Made Of” in a sparkly silver dress as giant beach balls bounce around the crowd and confetti blasts in time with the latter song’s key change.
For millennial women in particular, these shows conjure a sort of collective bliss. According to data from Live Nation, the Lucky Me Tour crowds have been 77% women, with 74% of the audience having at least one child — numbers demonstrating that, in this case, stars sometimes really are just like us. When Duff sings about anxiety spirals on “Future Tripping” or explores the emotional labor of coupledom on “Weather for Tennis” or the quiet devastation of a complicated father-daughter relationship on “The Optimist,” she’s not dealing in nostalgia, but telegraphing the same lived experiences that her millennial fans are also navigating in their 30s and 40s. And of course, everyone relates to power-belting “let the raaiiiiin fall down and wake my dreams!” alongside 20,000 other humans during “Come Clean.”
“Nostalgia sells, but success at this scale doesn’t happen because of nostalgia,” Manning says. “Hilary crafted an incredible album that’s beautiful to listen to and speaks to the lived experience of her fans in this chapter in their lives. Very few people can take what they did in the past and bring it into the present in a credible and artistic way, and she just nailed it. Fans are resonating because of that.”
Norma Kamali dress, Hagelstam shoes, Lemaire earrings.Gleeson Paulino
What no data can capture is how it’s resonating for Duff, too, in a way she might never have predicted.
“I understand fans hold me in this sweet capsule in their heart that holds a time in their life that was tender and uncomplicated,” she says. “But putting out a very honest and exposed record and them digesting and accepting it and being like, ‘Me too’ — that was very healing for me. It showed me that they don’t just care about me as the person they hold in that capsule, they care about me now as well.”
Which is why, during each show, she takes a moment to thank the audience “for letting me grow up.”
“I’ve had a great career and I feel really lucky,” she continues. “I also am a child star, and that’s a really hard thing to wrestle with as an adult. People don’t survive that. The fact that I’ve been able to survive and that I get to have this moment … I get to send love to grown-up Hilary and be like, ‘You did it!’ and also send love to little Hilary and be like, ‘Hey, we’re still here. Look at what we did.’ ”
And not just what she did, but what she’ll be doing. The Lucky Me Tour’s additional dates are booked entirely in arenas, a move the team felt confident about after tracking ticket sales this summer. “With amphitheaters, you can be a bit more flexible due to the various discounting programs and other promotions we run,” Manning says, “but typically you want to know before you go into arenas that you have the ability to sell them. Based on the prior tour and the sales velocity, we knew we had that momentum.”
The European tour begins May 7 in Madrid, then hits cities including Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Earlier in her career, Duff didn’t have a major overseas touring presence. She’d heard that certain cities were “hard ones to crack, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’ve got it in me to try to crack them at this stage in my life.’ ” Seeing strong numbers in places like Berlin is, she says, “a bit surprising to me.”
After Europe she’ll head to Latin America for shows in San Juan; São Paulo; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Santiago, Chile, before another U.S. run scheduled to end in November 2027. The few gaps in her current touring schedule could, theoretically, coincide nicely with festival dates. (There are, for example, no shows currently on her schedule in April, when Coachella happens.)
“We are definitely fielding those opportunities and discussing them for 2027 and beyond,” Manning says. “Universally, we feel one of the best ways to begin festival conversations is to demonstrate that you’re a proven ticket seller in festival markets, and we’ve put those wins on the board.”
Duff is also thinking about new music. “I 100% want to make a new album,” she says, and she’s enthusiastic about touring whatever that project may be. “Now that I’ve cracked that part of my business back open, I don’t want it to just go away again.”
Next time around, she’s intrigued by the residency model stars like Harry Styles and Bad Bunny have popularized recently. “People in Iowa are like fucking stoked that you come,” she says of the quantity and variety of cities on her current tour. “The idea behind touring for that big chunk in the summer was saying hi to everyone that’s been waiting a long time. I’m not sure it’s ever going to look like that again. I think it’ll more look like what these [artists with residencies are doing.]”
All that said, Duff isn’t working on new music quite yet, though she predicts a deluxe edition of Luck and released a Christmas EP, Holiday Things, in late October. (Even this project is a nod to her earlier self, as Duff’s first studio album was 2002’s Christmas set Santa Claus Lane.) She’d also like to shoot a new film or TV project, especially one that would allow her to “be home and have a job.”
“None of this is real,” she says of stardom. “The fans are real, and the fact that I’ve had fans supporting me for decades is crazy, but when I walk into my house at night and I hear the sounds of my life, my family — that’s real. So much of this is a game and strategy. I love it and I’m very grateful, but it is work, and it’s not like I’m 15 anymore and wowed by the whole thing.”
She’s also, well, mature enough to know the fanbase that matters most is the one that’s left after the roaring crowd has exited the venue. “At night,” she says, “I get to go home to people who look at me with the stars in their eyes that I really crave.”
Helsa dress, Demarson and Luv Aj earrings.Gleeson Paulino
Hilary Duff photographed on October 2, 2026 at Hype Studios in Los Angeles.
Styling by Neelo Noory
Hair by Barb Thompson at Forward Artists.
Makeup by Kelsey Deenihan at The Wall Group.
Manicure by Natalie Minerva at Forward Artists.
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