Hilary Duff Didn't Know 'Cadet Kelly' Resonated with LGBTQ Community: 'If It Helped Anybody, I Hope So'

Hilary Duff is looking back at her film Cadet Kelly with new eyes.

The How I Met Your Father star spoke to Cosmopolitan about her 2002 Disney Channel Original Movie after she was asked if she'd considered the film as "being queer-coded."

Duff, 34, said, "I have to watch the movie again. No one has brought that to my attention except for Tien Tran on our show who plays Ellen."

"She was like, 'Oh my God. It is a moment in the queer community. All that close-talking with Jennifer,'" Duff said. "I didn't know that. But if it helped anybody, I hope so."

Cadet Kelly follows Duff's teenage Kelly Collins as she enrolls at a military school which her new stern stepfather Joe (Gary Cole) attended.

As Kelly adjusts to the strict and disciplined new environment, she comes head to head with her commanding officer Jennifer Stone (Christy Carlson Romano) as the two compete to make their school the best drill team in the state.

On January 7, Carlson Romano shared a TikTok video in which she mimed singing "I know something you don't" over a screenshot of herself and Duff in the movie.

"Low key tho 🌈 #greenscreen #iknowsomethingyoudont #fyp #foryou #lgbtq," Carlson Romano wrote in the caption of the video.

In a September episode on her YouTube Channel, Carlson Romano spoke about the film's lasting impact on teenage girls.

"What I find interesting about the interpretation of the relationship between Cadet Kelly and Captain Stone is that there is a narrative that is in the culture right now that people are saying maybe they were in love, maybe there was an undercurrent of tension ebtween the two girls," she said.

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"It really helped a lot of girls identify their sexuality," she continued. "The military has traditionally been strict about that stuff and at the time that the movie came out we were not talking about that stuff. This character, Captain Stone, was the sexual awakening for a lot of the girls that felt that way at that age. I had a part in that! That's crazy, I never even thought about that. I'm very flattered."

Carlson Romano also said she could envision a future for her character, saying, "I'd like to think if Captain Stone came back, that we could honor this demographic of people that have been forever changed by this character. And we could say that, hey, maybe she's married to a woman and now she's the principal of the school and there's a new girl just like Kelly that's come."