{"id":441638,"date":"2026-05-14T16:43:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T16:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/441638\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T16:43:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T16:43:11","slug":"hayden-panettiere-memoir-what-it-was-like-on-heroes-nashville-scream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/441638\/","title":{"rendered":"Hayden Panettiere Memoir: What It Was Like on Heroes, Nashville, Scream"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe first time that Hayden Panettiere<\/a> realized she was tabloid fodder, she was 16 years old. A paparazzo had snapped her wearing shorts, bending over, and the photo was published along with commentary about her supposed cellulite. After that moment \u2014 and a brief dalliance with the comments section on the photo \u2014 she decided to start filtering out the press about herself. \u201cBut, sometimes, things would get through,\u201d she says. \u201cMy publicist would get a call asking for comment about something about my life, and I\u2019d have to decide, do I go no comment and let them put out whatever version they want? Or do I comment to get ahead of it, but be forced to talk about things that I really don\u2019t want to?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe actress, now 36, says that in the decades since, there have been countless moments of misinformation \u2014 and that it\u2019s what led to, and gave her the bravery to, finally sit down and write her memoir. In This Is Me: A Reckoning<\/a> (out May 19), Panettiere delves into her experience as a child actor at the whim of an overly eager stage mom, navigating her time on hit television shows (Heroes<\/a> and Nashville<\/a>) while her personal life crumbled and the substance abuse issues that stemmed from it all. \u201cOne of the things that I was most terrified about, when deciding whether or not to write this book, was that I knew what was going to come along with it,\u201d she says of the ways she\u2019s been rehashing her traumas during the book\u2019s still-nascent press tour. \u201cI had to sit with myself and make a decision, and I realized it was more important for me to share my stories and to wipe the slate clean.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, she speaks to The Hollywood Reporter about the biggest revelations from its pages: the powerful people who caused her harm, the way her personal tragedies affected her biggest career milestones and the way she\u2019s reflecting on the business of acting as a whole.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHachette Book Group<\/p>\n

\n\tPeople have been really supportive of you coming out as bisexual in the book. Have you been engaging with the headlines this time around?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve gotten a lot of positivity and it\u2019s heartwarming. Reading those comments from people within the industry and outside of it, it makes me feel like I made the right decision to write the book. <\/p>\n

\n\tA lot of the things that you discuss for the first time, like being bisexual, are things that you have known for a long time or experienced a long time ago. Is there anything in the book that you\u2019re still trying to process?<\/p>\n

\n\tHaving to touch on everything about my relationship with my mother, that was one of the harder things to talk about. While writing it, I realized even more so how much of a toll it took on me. And then of course, anytime that [the death of] my little brother comes up. It\u2019s still a subject where I\u2019m moments from bursting into tears any time I try to talk about it. Time can be a great healer, but in this case, my grief just seems to evolve. It\u2019s something I\u2019ll never get over. <\/p>\n

\n\tYou write a lot about your family, whether it\u2019s the complicated feelings you have about the way your mom pushed you during your career as a very young actress, or the dissolution of your parent\u2019s marriage. Did you tell people you would be writing about these things?<\/p>\n

\n\tI was fiercely protective of people in my writing. I felt very strongly about my ability to tell my stories and make them entertaining enough to put in a book, without having to drag people through the mud. I had members of my team that I would bounce ideas off of, or ask their opinions about things like that I was writing. I mean, my publicist is also my dear friend and I trust her, so I leaned on her to know. And then I made sure that Vlad [Klitschko, Panettiere\u2019s ex-fianc\u00e9 and father of her daughter] wasn\u2019t going to be upset with me. But other than that, I just had to speak my truth \u2014 and it\u2019s mine alone.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are some celebrities that you name, like when you discuss getting set up with Steven Colletti, or dating and then breaking up with Milo Ventimiglia. And others whom you don\u2019t name, like the incident on the yacht with the much older man. Was there a strategy for who did or didn\u2019t get named?<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, because it was a bad look for them and [the people I didn\u2019t name] were generally people within my industry. They\u2019re people I could run into again. I didn\u2019t want to put myself in that position. Things happened a long time ago, but it was to protect me and my company from being sued by some very pissed-off famous people.<\/p>\n

\n\tCan you talk about the morality clause you had with Neutrogena, because I think a lot of readers might not realize how standard that is. <\/p>\n

\n\tAny contract you have, when you are a representative of a company, always has a morality clause. You are the face of a company, and the company wants to look good in the public eye. <\/p>\n

\n\tDo you have the ability to negotiate back and forth on what each party considers \u2018moral\u2019 behavior?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat was always the interesting question, and what threw me the most about my postpartum depression being the thing that ultimately ended my time with them. Like, really, of all the things that people representing your company have done, the thing that you\u2019re going to say is not allowed and that breaks the morality clause is speaking about my postpartum depression? That\u2019s not a moral thing, that\u2019s just a scientific thing. That\u2019s not even legal. You cannot legally fire somebody for having postpartum depression. It\u2019s not a choice I made. It wasn\u2019t my fault. So that one blew my mind. <\/p>\n

\n\tDo you think the same thing would happen today?<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter I was public about it and talked about the Neutrogena aspect of it, I don\u2019t think anybody in that industry will be doing that to anyone else.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tStorm Santos<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother contract you discuss in the book is your no-kill clause in Scream. I didn\u2019t realize you could ask for that. <\/p>\n

\n\tYou can ask. It doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re going to get it. And there are loopholes. It took a couple films for them to bring me back into the Scream franchise. And obviously, I wasn\u2019t in the last one, but I\u2019m still alive and kicking in that universe so I would be thrilled to come back whenever.<\/p>\n

\n\tYour younger brother, Jansen, passed away shortly before the Scream 6 press tour started and you write about trying to go through with your press commitments. Did you feel pressure to do that?<\/p>\n

\n\tI didn\u2019t know whether it would be a welcome distraction or whether I was pushing myself too soon. It wasn\u2019t until I was physically there doing it that I realized I was about to break down and had to cancel on a bunch of people. It takes a team that tells you it\u2019s OK to cancel, that you\u2019re allowed to, and that was my publicist. I\u2019m not sure I should have put myself in that position.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen you do feel pressure, does it come from a studio or network wanting you to honor your commitments? Or is it more of a fear that you need to take all the moments you can to do press or to work?<\/p>\n

\n\tI think it\u2019s the way I was raised. I was groomed. I was like a little soldier and I always have been. No was never an option. It was just, here are your scenes, here\u2019s your dialogue, memorize it, hit the marks, do what your director tells you to do. I took my marching orders. <\/p>\n

\n\tAt what point did you realize that being groomed in that way was abnormal?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I started self-harming in the form of substance abuse. My people pleasing had built up and up, it was anger and anxiety and frustration. My life revolved around other people, and I lived to make other people happy and I was the last one on the list. The pressure of that built and built and just exploded. I started figuring out any way I could get through it. Sometimes they\u2019ll say in treatment that, believe it or not, our addictions probably saved us at a certain point. <\/p>\n

\n\tOnce you realized that was happening, did you find it easier to make business decisions for yourself?<\/p>\n

\n\tNo. Then I was dealing with all those years of being the yes man and not sticking up for myself. Never saying no, I don\u2019t feel comfortable doing that or telling people that I\u2019m overworked. I would push myself to do whatever they wanted on set, but it was too much for any one person.<\/p>\n

\n\tCan you pinpoint the role, or the business decision, that marked when your career was fully yours?<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t think anybody has seen it yet fully. It\u2019s to come; it\u2019s still something I\u2019m working on.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou write about struggling with the storylines of your two biggest shows \u2014\u00a0the way the quality dipped on later seasons of Heroes, and the way Juliette\u2019s arc on Nashville started to resemble your own personal strife. Was there ever a point at which the actors on those shows had the chance to speak up about it?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe scripts come in so fast, and we had so little time, that we\u2019d really be throwing a wrench in the wheel. At this point in my career, I might try and say something like, \u201cLet\u2019s just please have a conversation before this even starts. Please don\u2019t drag me through the mud constantly.\u201d I\u2019m happy to do it once in a while, but it takes a toll on me.<\/p>\n

\n\tDid you have any mentors on those sets who could try to protect you or stand up for you?<\/p>\n

\n\tI did, but not really on Nashville. I felt like I was very much on my own on Nashville. Jonathan Jackson was a great support to me when we played husband and wife. He\u2019s an incredible scene partner and if I needed anything, he was there in a second.<\/p>\n

\n\tKnowing what you do about the business, would you want your younger self to start acting as a child? Would you feel comfortable with your daughter doing it?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s the thing is I will always wonder if I would have gravitated naturally towards acting, if I had not been pushed into it. But I see my daughter, at 11 years old, taking an interest. I will say, please go to college, please try things out. And if you really love it, then I will support you wholeheartedly. And if she doesn\u2019t like it, she can get out. Her world doesn\u2019t have to revolve around that. I never had anything to fall back on. I never went to college. There\u2019s no going back. But I am grateful for the position that I\u2019m in, and for the things I want to accomplish. I would love to do action, I would love to produce, I want to direct. I\u2019d love to do comedy. People would be shocked to know that I might be a little bit funny (Laughs). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first time that Hayden Panettiere realized she was tabloid fodder, she was 16 years old. A paparazzo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":441639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[412,458,146,18170,28280,85,46,4253],"class_list":["post-441638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-books","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-hayden-panettiere","tag-heroes","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-nashville"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}