It’s A Cinderella Story, Hilary just say yes.
It’s been 21 years, but Chad Michael Murray is still head over heels for Hilary Duff, his costar in the swooning teen romance. “Hilary’s awesome. If you’ve ever met Hilary or if you’ve ever seen her even walking down the street, she glows,” Murray recently told PEOPLE.
Murray said that Duff “has an an aura that she can walk into a room and you just go right to her. She just has this magnetic presence, and she can light up a room… That’s why she’s been so successful for so many years. She was awesome and I just remember her and her team and everybody, like, her teacher, they were so cool, so nice. Everybody was the best. Her mom, the whole team, everybody I got along with over there.”
Murray stated unambiguously, “I love this movie” – nothing to overlook given the preponderance of former child and teen stars who look back with visceral loathing (or at least cringe) at past roles they may not have selected as adults.
“It’s in my top two. I don’t know if it’s one or two, but this movie felt like a high school field trip, because we were just all friends,” he said. Murray explained that he managed to get his then roommate and best friend, J.D. Pardo, cast as his character Austin Ames’ best friend. “You just make relationships that, you know, they are awesome. You’re watching Jennifer Coolidge just be the powerhouse that she is. Gosh, everybody on that movie. I tell you, they hit a sweet spot.”
Murray remembers shooting A Cinderella Story with Duff as an experience as close to a real-life Cinderella story as a film production’s likely to ever get. “We were two kids having fun making a big movie. I don’t think I ever expected it to be what it was, you know?”
Murray plays Austin as the outwardly popular but inwardly miserable creative savant forced to play the part of a typical football jock. Unknowingly, he strikes up an anonymous online relationship with Duff’s Sam Montgomery, who’s outwardly Austin’s inverse, but equally miserable and creative.
There are masks, ballgowns, a cellphone substitute for a glass slipper – everything one might expect of a mid-aughts update to the iconic folk tale. Of course there’s romance, something that never extended off screen, though Murray and Duff both dated costars on other projects. But Duff did admit in 2016, “I definitely had a crush on him. We had a few kissing scenes in the movie and I remember feeling pretty nervous about that, but then we became friends and I wasn’t so nervous anymore.”
Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.
Hilary Duff and Chad Michael Murray as Sam Montgomery and Austin Ames in ‘A Cinderella Story’.
Ron Batzdorff/Warner Bros
Duff and Murray have moved on to bigger, brighter things, with the former appearing in the lead role of How I Met Your Father and Murray recently reprising his role in Freakier Friday, the long-awaited sequel to Freaky Friday, starring Duff’s one-time rival Lindsay Lohan.
But even with dozens of credits between him and A Cinderella Story, Murray said it’s still the film fans quote at him the most. “The quotes are usually from Cinderella Story… I think, ‘Waiting for you is like waiting for rain in this drought’ all the time, that’s one. ‘It’s you Peyton, the one I want standing next to me.'”
