Disney+’s ill-fated “Lizzie McGuire” reboot remains a sore spot for many who rooted for the continuation of the early aughts series.
When Jake Thomas, the actor who played the mischievous younger brother to the show’s titular character, found out that the revival officially got canceled in 2020, he took it as a sign.
“I have a theory: to a certain degree, the show is cursed,” the 35-year-old actor said during a June 14 interview on “Zach Sang Show Clips.” During the episode, Thomas reflected on the series and its several brushes with revitalization.
For two seasons, Thomas appeared as Matt McGuire and appeared alongside Hilary Duff in the Disney Channel original series that aired from 2001 to 2004. The show inspired the 2003 film “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” which had a theatrical release.
“Because this is not the first time we’ve tried to do a continuation of the show,” he explained. “Originally, we were going to do, after the original run on Disney Channel, they were going to put us on prime time ABC.”
Thomas reflected on how Disney had once considered a spinoff series, which was going to follow Lizzie McGuire into high school.
“(It would have been) Lizzie McGuire: now she’s in high school!” he explained. “But it was going to be a prime time, like a dramatic series … it just never came together.”
Over a decade later, in 2019, Disney sought to revive its focus on Lizzie — this time, with the Disney+ reboot series that was meant to follow Lizzie as an adult. At the time, the studio announced the series on social media and later completed production on two episodes before its ultimate cancelation in 2020.
As the story goes, the reboot never saw the light of day. However, Thomas explained that he didn’t hear about the series’ cancelation from the studio or production, but through a friend.
“He’s like, ‘Hey, man, I’m so sorry.’ I was like, ‘What? He was like, ‘Hilary posted on Instagram,'” Thomas explained before detailing his experience of reading the post by Duff, in which she announced the reboot’s cancelation and expressed her disappointment.
“I found out I wasn’t going to have a job, which kind of sucked, and then later, I got a call,” he recalled. “I mean, it sucked to find out I didn’t have a job from Instagram.”
“I’m definitely disheartened, just because, you know, I never thought they would really do a reboot,” he added. “When it did start to happen, it just it felt very unreal.”
Thomas details the process being such a surreal experience, especially as the McGuire house had been brought back to life.
“I still to this day, it’s kind of like, ‘Did that really happen?'” he explained. “Because they recreated down to every detail they could find the McGuire house interior on the sound stage, and walking into that felt like that was a space that was so impactful within my life and my childhood, of growing up on that set and seeing it again, it was crazy.”
Thomas said the experience put him through “all the different stages of grief,” but that he is now able to look back with perspective.
“It is what it is,” he concluded. “My response nowadays is just like, ‘That’s Hollywood.'”
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