With plenty of new shows arriving on the 2026 TV premiere schedule, I’ve still got a soft spot for the Disney Channel shows that dominated my afternoons in the early 2000s. Even Stevens and Lizzie McGuire were two of the network’s biggest hits, and I always assumed they coexisted pretty peacefully. Apparently, somebody forgot to tell Shia LaBeouf. According to his former co-star Christy Carlson Romano, he had a one-sided rivalry with Hilary Duff, and I genuinely had no idea.
Romano, who played LaBeouf’s older sister Ren on Even Stevens, recently appeared on The Joe Vulpis Podcast, where the conversation turned to whether Disney Channel stars had beef with their Nickelodeon counterparts. She said they rarely saw those actors and that the real competition was happening within Disney, especially when it came to ratings. That’s when Romano brought up LaBeouf’s feelings about Duff’s hugely popular show:
Shia was definitely beefing with Hilary. Hilary had no clue about that. I’m sure she was doing her own thing, but he would always be kind of like, trash-talking Lizzie McGuire. And I was always like, ‘We don’t know anything about them.’ Like, why?
The fact that Duff apparently didn’t even know there was a rivalry is what gets me. Imagine minding your own business, playing a teenager whose animated alter ego occasionally narrates her problems, and learning decades later that another Disney Channel star was apparently trash-talking your show. That’s some remarkably specific after-school drama.
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There was a real ratings competition behind it, though. Even Stevens arrived in 2000 and turned LaBeouf’s troublemaking Louis Stevens into a breakout character. Lizzie McGuire debuted the following year and quickly became one of the channel’s defining hits. Interestingly, Duff’s journey to landing the role was pretty wild, though she probably had no idea she’d eventually become part of an alleged rivalry with another Disney star.
Romano suggested the competition mattered especially deeply to LaBeouf, whose childhood and family circumstances had been difficult. She wasn’t excusing the comments, exactly, but she offered some perspective on why he might have taken the rivalry so seriously:
He was very competitive. He wanted to be the number one show on the network. He had to be the number one show because I think his life depended on that show doing well. He had a rough upbringing and I think he needed that show to do well for him.
That puts a different spin on Romano’s story for me. We’re talking about kids carrying two of Disney Channel’s biggest shows, and she believes LaBeouf saw Even Stevens as something he couldn’t afford to lose. He’s spoken about his complicated childhood before, even exploring parts of it in Honey Boy, although he later acknowledged that elements of the film’s depiction of his father were fictionalized. Of course, this is Romano’s recollection of his behavior more than two decades later, and from the sound of it, Duff didn’t even know there was a rivalry.
Romano hasn’t exactly sugarcoated her own experience working with LaBeouf, either. In a previous interview, she described their Even Stevens relationship as competitive and sometimes difficult, particularly as the show began focusing more on his character. The two aren’t in contact today, although she’s said she still wishes him well.
Here’s another funny little Disney Channel connection: Romano and Duff actually starred together in the 2002 movie Cadet Kelly, which Duff recently discussed revisiting for a potential sequel. So while LaBeouf was apparently keeping score, his co-star was making movies with the very person he considered competition.
As for Duff, her relationship with Lizzie McGuire has continued long after the original series ended. She’s even spoken candidly about Disney’s decision to scrap the planned revival, making it clear that she still cares about the character and what the show meant to fans.
Neither Duff nor LaBeouf had publicly responded to Romano’s latest claims when the initial reports broke. Still, I know I’ll be thinking about this the next time I revisit either show. It’s pretty funny to imagine that while the rest of us were flipping between Even Stevens and Lizzie McGuire after school, one of their stars was apparently keeping score the whole time.
