Haylie Duff Talks Lifetime’s ‘Pretty Hurts’ and If She’ll Work With Sister Hilary in the Future

Haylie Duff found her latest role in Lifetime‘s Pretty Hurts hits close to home. The movie, premiering June 28, sees the 40-year-old multi-hyphenate step into the heels of a former beauty pageant winner and mom named Julie. She and her daughter Lauren (Sarah Borne) discover the dark side of the teen pageant world.

Lauren, a high school senior, was accepted to her dream university with hopes of becoming a doctor.  However, in order to pay for the tuition she looked to follow in Julie’s footsteps and enter a pageant to win scholarship money. Lauren found out quickly that beyond  the rhinestone gowns, tiaras and striving for perfection reveals a harsh reality where quid pro quo manipulation and toxicity born out of the competition reign. 

Duff may not have been a beauty queen, but she does know a thing or two about weathering the entertainment business. She and her younger sister Hilary Duff started acting at an early age. Duff, whose credits include 7th Heaven, Napoleon Dynamite and Material Girls, is also a mother of two in Ryan, 8, and Lulu, 5, with fiancé Matt Rosenberg. Another reason she signed on for the movie was the fact it also dealt with other issues parents and their children face. 

In the film, Lauren’s best friend Rae (Kaci Barker) falls seriously ill with a potentially deadly but vaccine-preventable disease meningitis. This motivates Lauren to use the pageant platform to create awareness and advocate for education.

Duff hopes the movie serves as a conversation starter for meningitis prevention among teens and young adults. The film is part of GSK’s Ask2BSure public health campaign, inspired by real families affected by meningitis. GSK provided financial and content support for the film. Ahead of the premiere, Duff opens up about the part, family life and whether she will work with sister Hilary again.

Pretty Hurts has many layers to it. What were your first impressions when you read the script for this? 

Haylie Duff: It was originally titled the “Untitled Beauty Pageant Movie,” so I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, “Fun, a beauty pageant movie.” My first impression was that it would be this lighthearted thing. Reading the script, it really took me by surprise. It is so layered. It has so many storylines going on. The meningitis storyline really affected me because it was something I did not know about. Obviously, I’d heard of meningitis before. I’m a mom of two young girls, and I was just unaware that it affects people the way it does, as quickly as it does, especially young people. I didn’t know the risk was as intense as it is. I also didn’t know we were sending our young people off to college unprotected in the way we are. I really loved it has a really strong message to it without it being all about that. I love that you really get to experience this strong bond between a mother and daughter. 

You get to watch them navigate these struggles together. Bullying, perfectionism, the societal pressures within friend groups. You really get a front row seat to how a mother and daughter work together to figure out how to navigate these difficult times. They ultimately come out stronger because of it. I can only hope I could be that lucky to have that with my own daughters when we face those things. That I can end up the way Julie does…I think to be able to spread the word about something that affects so many young people in such a severe way, it’s why I really wanted to do this one. I felt it was really important.

You’ve also grown up in the entertainment business. What kind of parallels did you find with this project? 

We were talking about this earlier where someone asked me if I would let my daughter do a pageant. Or would I let my daughter be an actress. I don’t want to villainize something fully. I don’t want to say just because there are these bad experiences or these negative things that it happens to everyone or that it’s all bad. I think that you can find negative experiences in pageants, acting, the dance world, and sports. 

I think wherever there are passionate parents and highly competitive parents and highly competitive children, you are going to find those toxic spaces. What I think it does do is make me as a mom want to focus on being really close to my children and focus on keeping strong relationships with them. Then I could see if I needed to step in and intervene if something looked like it was happening or they needed more support. All you can do as a parent as they’re growing up is support them in the best way you can and encourage them to be the best versions of themselves.

Having been in the industry for so long, how do you reflect on how things are today compared to when you started out?  What was it like breaking in for you and your sister and how your parents handled everything? 

I feel we both ended up pretty normal. I think it’s because my mom stayed really involved in my life. She did stay close to me. My mom is still close to me. I’m here in Los Angeles right now, even though I live in Austin and am obligated to see my mom for at least an hour while I’m here. I spend a lot of time with my mom. I think the fact she was very involved in us navigating this industry is probably the reason we didn’t go off the rails more. I’m not saying we didn’t get into some trouble here and there, but nothing all that serious. 

What was it like working with Sarah and building that mother-daughter bond for the movie? 

I absolutely loved Sarah. I can’t speak more love and admiration for her. She is so talented and so special. She and I, really from the second we started working together, felt like family. It was funny, even our director Brian on set would say, “You really are funny. It feels like you are family.” And she is not all that younger than me, which is kind of funny. She is just a really special actress and person. 

Who was a mentor for you early in your career starting out? 

I had some good fortune of working with some really special actresses throughout the years and made impacts on me. Patty Duke comes to mind. I really loved spending time with her on set. She gave me wonderful advice, spent a lot of time with me when we worked together. Anjelica Huston was another who made a big impact on me. She went out of her way to encourage me and left a lasting impact on me. Also, it was the directors too. Martha Coolidge was one. 

You were on a lot of TV sets. Is there one set or show you wish you could have stayed on longer? 

That’s such a good question! I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that. It’s so funny that they often leave me. I always did movies more than TV really, and they are always so definitive where the story wraps up in the end. One of them that comes to mind is I did a series for Hallmark that were westerns Loves Takes Wing. We had Sarah Jones on that. It was the one I did with Patty Duke and Cloris Leachman. That was a great set where if I would have to revisit one, it would be that. 

It was 20 years ago when you started on 7th Heaven. What do you remember about that time? 

Brenda Hampton is another who had a huge impact on my life. I used to spend a lot of time with her. She was the creator of 7th Heaven. That is a fascinating woman who has inspired me endlessly for many years. I loved that my character, Sandy, was unconventional. She got pregnant in college. She had to navigate being a single mom. I was very young at the time playing that role. I knew nothing about playing a single mom. I had to wear a pregnancy suit every day, which I did not like. I just like that she was different and making the most of her situation. She was very strong. She was independent. I just in general loved working on that show. It was a great group of people. Good times. 

Your kids are getting older and maybe starting to understand what mom does for a living. Are you starting to introduce them to the work you’ve done? 

No, not really. They’ve seen Napoleon Dynamite. 

Wow, they’ve seen Napoleon Dynamite? 

They saw that because my daughter came home to school one day and said her friend came into class and said something about Summer Wheatly. She was like, “Who is Summer Wheatly?” He was like, “How do you not know your mom is Summer Wheatly?” She came home and was mad at me about it. She was like,” Mom, who is that?” I explained it. She knows I’m and actor and am in this business, but she was 6 at the time. I didn’t feel I need to explain that. I was doing my cooking show at the time. She was seeing me more as myself on Cooking Channel and not really as characters. That was the first foray into seeing me as an actor. My kids sit with me when I’m editing, so they may experience more of what I do behind the scenes than they do in front of the camera. Although they did come to the set of Pretty Hurts, and they think Sarah is their big sister. They ask to Facetime her all the time. They did come to that set and had a lot of fun with that. The Sherri Hill gowns were gorgeous. There are certain sets they’ll be more excited about than others. 

How is it finding the balance between work and family? 

I came off four months straight of work, which is a bad career and life balance. That was not good planning on my part. That was kind of hard. I left in February to go direct a movie and was not back home until mid-May. That was not ideal. Now I’m home for the summer and shooting a Christmas movie in Austin, which worked out really well where my kids can come visit the set. It’s all ebb and flow. Everything works out. 

You mentioned Martha Coolidge earlier. We’re coming up to the 20-year anniversary year since the release of Material Girls, which she directed. Do you see yourself working with your sister again? 

Is it 20 years? Wow. That is a movie I feel like my daughters would love. They have not seen that, and I feel they would love that movie. I don’t know. Do you mean like for a reunion for that movie? 

Or maybe a sequel or together on another project? 

Look, never say never. I think we both needed to go and find our own way, but never say never. 

Pretty Hurts, June 28, 8/7c, Lifetime