How Lalaine From ‘Lizzie McGuire’ Overcame Hard Times and Made a Nostalgic Comeback
Learn about what she did after the beloved teen show, including narrating an audiobook about the Disney Channel
Lizzie McGuire is best known for being the show that made Hilary Duff famous, but the actress who played her best friend was just as delightful and funny as the young blonde starlet. Lizzie’s bestie, Miranda Sanchez, was played by the mononymous actress and musician Lalaine, and while she didn’t end up earning quite the level of recognition that Duff did, she’s recently made a surprising comeback tied to her signature show. Read on to learn all about it and take a look back at her Disney Channel days.
Broadway beginnings and Disney Channel drama
Lalaine Vergara-Paras got her start as a child stage actress in Les Misérables on Broadway. She made her onscreen debut in the 1999 TV movie Border Line, and also played one of the orphans in the TV movie of Annie that same year.
Lalaine had her big break when she was cast in Lizzie McGuire in 2001, but she left the show during its final season in 2004 and didn’t appear in The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Lalaine left in part to pursue a musical career and work on other projects, but there was also growing tension between her and Duff. As showrunner Stan Rogow described, “The two girls were literally best friends for three-quarters of the series, maybe more. And then they had a blowup that never got healed.”
Lalaine, who is Filipino and who played a Mexican character in the show, also revealed that she experienced discrimination during her Disney Channel days, saying, “Most of my life growing up, I was forced to look as ‘white’ as possible.”
Despite these unfortunate aspects of her experience, Lalaine still had good things to say about Lizzie McGuire. As she described in a 2015 HuffPost interview, “If I think about it, which I do every now and then, you know, a nice humble smile comes across my face. I was lucky enough to be a part of something that touched a lot of kids and teens that were going through their lives and their awkward stages, and felt a little better doing it with us . . . The fact that I was help for a good amount of girls, that means something. It’s a lot of responsibility. I may have effed that responsibility up a bit when I went through my dark days, but for the ones that haven’t totally abandoned me, I appreciate that a whole lot.”
What Lalaine did after ‘Lizzie McGuire’
After leaving Lizzie McGuire, Lalaine starred in the 2003 Disney Channel Original Movie You Wish! She then made a two-episode appearance in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, playing a slayer-in-training who sadly dies by suicide. Lalaine also had a few movie roles, and appeared in Promised Land (2004), Her Best Move (2007), Royal Kill (2009) and Easy A (2010).
In addition to acting, Lalaine pursued a music career, but her 2003 debut record, Inside Story, didn’t sell well, and she hasn’t released an album since then. She performed a few songs for other Disney Channel projects, and in 2010, she became the bassist for Vanity Theft, though she was only in the band for a year.
Like so many former child stars before and since, Lalaine also ran into some trouble in her personal life. In 2007, she was arrested for drug possession and ordered to go to rehab. As she told HuffPost, “I had a time where I went through what I call my ‘dark years,’ where I just went nuts and stupid, just being angry and acting like I was so badass. That just turned into me digging myself in a deep hole, and after I got arrested, that was like a slap in the face that I needed to turn my perspective around.”
In the years after her arrest, Lalaine showed up in various web series, and she most recently costarred in the 2020 film Definition Please, playing the best friend of a former spelling bee champion.
Lalaine’s latest project
Lalaine, now 38, mostly keeps a low profile these days, but in 2024, she made a surprising comeback by narrating the audiobook for Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire. The book, a deep dive into the history of the Disney Channel by journalist Ashley Spencer, is a dishy read filled with millennial nostalgia (including plenty of Lizzie McGuire anecdotes, of course), and Lalaine said she was “honored” to be involved with the project.
It’s not the first time Lalaine has come back to the show—in 2020, she and her former cast members did a virtual Instagram table read of one of Lizzie McGuire’s most beloved episodes. Don’t expect to see Lalaine in a reboot any time soon though, as plans for a show following a grown-up Lizzie were scrapped that year, but we’ll always love her presence as the ultimate stylish aughts BFF.
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