Hayden Panettiere is one of those actors who everyone seems to have an anecdote about; specifically, about how her filmography has resonated in their life. For me, it’s Remember the Titans, the now-iconic 2000 football tearjerker in which she played the precocious daughter of the team’s coach. When I tell Panettiere, now 36, that my younger brothers wore out our VHS tape of the film and still quote it (a lot) to this day, she immediately joins me in my nostalgia.
“That is one of my favorite movies of all time, and the fact that I got to be a part of it is crazy,” she says. “Usually when you’re in something, you don’t really say that it’s one of your favorites…and it’s one of my favorite experiences I’ve ever had. If I could go back to that moment and be 10 again on that set, I would in the blink of an eye.”
Panettiere is doing more reminiscing these days about another of her best-known roles: as Juliette Barnes in the 2012 series Nashville, the massively popular ABC soap about rival country stars in Music City. All six seasons just dropped on Netflix this week, so she won’t be alone in her nostalgia for long as veteran fans embark on a binge and new viewers discover it.
“People really, really loved that show,” says Panettiere. “They loved the human stories, the fact that it gives you kind of a peek into this Hollywood life. It was a show that resonated with so many people, and I love hearing about how my character impacted people in general, but especially women and young women going through the tumultuous stuff that Juliet constantly had to deal with.”
Nashville nostalgia may be top of mind, but Panettiere is also looking toward the future a lot these days. The actor first appeared on screen at 11 months old and worked consistently until Nashville wrapped in 2018. It was only then that she took time off for a few years—her first real break in well, ever—and focused on herself. At times, she worried she’d never be able to fully return to the career she loved.
“I didn’t plan on taking the amount of time off that I did,” she says. “I took the time off that I felt I needed. The longer you stay away from something, it becomes a much bigger deal when you do decide to step back into it. I was very nervous stepping back into it. I was nervous that I had lost my mojo, if you will, and that I wouldn’t be able to do things like memorize lines as quickly as I did before. It’s a muscle, just like anything else, and I spent years strengthening it. I was surprised to find out how quickly that muscle atrophied when I wasn’t using it.”
It wasn’t until she began filming a starring role more than five years later, for the upcoming psychological thriller film Sleepwalker, that she began to, as she says, feel as if she got her mojo back.