Christy Carlson Romano, who first broke out on the sitcom “Even Stevens,” has revealed that co-star Shia LaBeouf used to trash-talk competing Disney Channel show “Lizzie McGuire” and that he was “definitely beefing” with the show’s star, Hilary Duff.
“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,’” Romano said on a recent episode of “The Joe Vulpis Podcast.” “I was always like, ‘We don’t know anything about them. Like why are you…’” she recalled, adding that he was “very competitive.”
She continued: “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.” Earlier in the episode, the actress explained that while the actors didn’t have “beef” with rival actors at Nickelodeon, there was competition within the network to get the best ratings.
Last month, ahead of the release of her memoir, “Once Upon a Trainwreck: The Fall and Rise of a Child Star,” Romano said that she and LaBeouf were “like oil and water” while guesting on a podcast, despite being just 14 and 12 years old, respectively, at the time.
Romano explained that their on-set incompatibility stemmed from how they were raised.
“I was being raised and brought up to be this type A, I mean exactly like Ren Stevens. Like, you know your lines, you hit your marks, you don’t mess up,” she said. “You’re a New York kid, like that comes with a certain echelon… I was trying to go to pre-college Juilliard… everything we were doing, my mom called it cross-training, came with a certain dollar amount of training.”
In comparison, LaBeouf has long been open about his tumultuous childhood and has said that his father was a recovering addict, and at times abusive. “He was a Venice Beach kind of bum kid,” said Romano. “It’s like that kind of vagrant fun, but also very chaotic and very scary lifestyle, and he was very young to be having that.” She likened his upbringing to the lifestyle depicted in the 1995 Larry Clark film “Kids.”
Romano later starred alongside Duff in the Disney Channel original movie “Cadet Kelly.”