Hilary Duff Reveals Who The Father Was In How I Met Your Father

After four years of fan theories, Hilary Duff is finally able to give How I Met Your Father fans the answer to the show’s central question. Unlike 2005’s How I Met Your Mother, which got to unveil its full story over nine seasons, Duff’s 2022 spinoff was abruptly canceled after two seasons. The sudden ending left fans unsatisfied, as the father was never revealed. But now, Duff is detailing what would’ve happened had the show continued.

When Duff was asked to identify the father’s identity now that HIMYF has been over for a few years, she initially responded with a joke. “I was just going to say Jason Segel,” Duff said during her appearance on the “Mythical Kitchen” YouTube channel. Segel actually had expressed interest in reprising his HIMYM role of Marshall in the spinoff before it was canceled, so maybe Duff wasn’t saying that fully in jest.

Then, she touched on one of the biggest theories, which was that her character Sophie would get with Suraj Sharma’s Sid, even though Sid is engaged and then married to Hannah throughout the two seasons. “A lot of people said it was Suraj. And I was like, ‘Whoa that’s a hot take,’” Duff said.

One reason Sid had been a prominent theory is that he was one of the handful of men Sophie met in the pilot episode, which ends with Sophie from decades in the future revealing that was the night she met her child’s father. However, Duff revealed that the show had planned to go a much more sneaky route to get around that first-episode promise.

“I don’t think it was any of the people in the room. It was going to be like, an extra walking by,” Duff said. “I know we started the season by being like, ‘The father of my child is in this room,’ but I don’t think it was any of the main characters. I think as the season progressed we would’ve like zoomed in on an extra in the background, and then it would’ve been that person later in life.”

It sounds like the spinoff was going to follow the path of the original series, which didn’t introduce the titular “mother” until its penultimate season. Because of that, Duff has no idea if the writers had a surprise actor in mind to eventually play this part — but she thinks there’s someone who might: “Maybe Kim Cattrall knows!”