While Mandy Moore has been in the public eye for a stunning 25 years, it's safe to say the 40-year-old is not missing her teen pop star days like candy.
Take the time she was tapped to cover Vanity Fair—alongside fellow teenage icons Hilary Duff, Amanda Bynes, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Alexis Bledel, Evan Rachel Wood, Raven-Symoné and Lindsay Lohan—back in 2003, some four years after she made her debut with "Candy," a saccharinely sweet song that truly is like sugar to your heart.
The experience involved "a lot of teenage drama for sure," Moore said on influencer Valeria Lipovetsky's Not Alone podcast April 9. "There was a fight over a boy I wanna say between two people, I don't even remember who. I remember feeling like a real outlier and outsider like, 'I am not a part of the cool kids club.'"
Save for her romance with then-boyfriend Andy Roddick.
Noting "one of the Olsen twins" had a crush on the tennis pro at the time, she told Lipovetsky, "I just remember feeling really cool about that."
Of course, in the 20-plus years since, the singer-actress has netted several bigger wins.
Moore parlayed her TRL success ("Candy" spent 61 days on the MTV series' popular countdown) into tackling roles that ranged from Princess Diaries mean girl and a (22-year-old spoiler alert!) teen stricken with leukemia in the coming-of-age tearjerker A Walk to Remember to an actual Disney princess in the animated Tangled—each as stick-in-your-mind memorable as her breakout hit.
Then there was the quite literal years of range she displayed as family matriarch Rebecca Pearson in NBC's emotionally devastating This Is Us.
Through it all, she called acting her "day job".
"Because I never achieved the kind of success that most of my other contemporaries did," Moore noted to In Style in 2022, "it allowed me to keep making music, but make it on my own terms."
And, speaking of her fellow early aughts pop stars, she and Duff, along with their respective husbands Taylor Goldsmith and Matthew Koma, are now besties who laugh about their anxiety-inducing 2003 VF cover "all the time," Moore shared on Not Alone. "We were such babies then and to think fast-forward 20 years from now… our husbands are best friends. She's a very, very dear friend to me."
Moore, mom to sons Gus, 3, and Ozzie, 17 months, can also appreciate how wild it is that Lana Thomas and Lizzie McGuire take baby-and-me classes with Sharpay Evans (Ashley Tisdale) and the singer wed to Spy Kids' Juni Cortez (Meghan Trainor).
So, of course Duff—currently expecting baby No. 4—was recently on hand to mark Moore's milestone 40th birthday at L.A.'s Hotel Cafe, a party Goldsmith put together complete with candy-themed tees.
"This is 40," Moore wrote of the bash, in a post shared to Instagram on her birthday April 10. "Elated to step into this next decade with purpose, intention and gratitude for all that it has in store."
And if you wanna be with her as she reflects on everything that she's accomplished, keep reading to remember her decades-long evolution.
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