‘How I Met Your Father’: Paget Brewster to Guest Star as Sophie’s Mother

While you may have gotten used to see Paget Brewster as Emily Prentiss for most of the 15-season run of Criminal Minds, some of her other credits — Friends, Another Period — have her showing off her comedic skills, so we’re pretty excited to see what she does on How I Met Your Father.

Brewster will guest star in the February 8 episode of Hulu’s comedy as Sophie’s (Hilary Duff) mother, TVLine reports. Lori is a former model whose “unexpected visit from Sophie’s mother heightens Valentina’s concern for her best friend.” We’ll have to wait and see what exactly has led to that visit. Right now, it’s a one-episode appearance, though we wouldn’t be surprised if she returns if the comedy is picked up for a second season.

We have heard a bit about Lori already, in the series premiere and third episode, through conversations involving Sophie, her best friend Valentina (Francia Raisa), and “Father” candidate Jesse (Chris Lowell). First, Jesse had assumed that due to Sophie’s “Brooklyn Bridge soulmate” speech — she waited so long to walk across it, she was waiting to do so with hers — that she was “one of those people whose parents actually stayed married,” therefore “if they found each other, there must be someone out there for everyone.” All she’d said at the time was “something like that.”

It was Valentina who offered a more honest picture of Sophie’s parents. Her “mom is a party girl who bounces around from boyfriend to boyfriend,” she revealed. “Her dad wasn’t even in the picture. The only thing magical about Sophie’s life is that she still believes in love at all.”

Then two episodes later, Sophie herself admitted Jesse was “way off” about her parents. “My childhood was kind of a mess. It was just my mom and I, bouncing around from one boyfriend’s house to the next. We were more like sisters than mother and daughter, and I was the big sister, always picking up the pieces after every breakup, and I got really good at fixing her,” she shared. That led to who she is today: a fixer, “especially when I can’t figure out how to fix things for myself … like find my person. I want to so bad and it just keeps not happening.”

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How I Met Your Father ended its most recent episode with Sophie and Drew (Josh Peck) still together, meaning there could be a good chance that Lori meets him — and therefore we get a Grandfathered reunion onscreen. (Brewster played Peck’s character’s mother on the Fox comedy.) It should be interesting to see what Lori has to say about her daughter’s love life and what she thinks of her new friend group.

How I Met Your Father, Tuesdays, Hulu