Hayden Panettiere Says Filming Nashville Was ‘Traumatizing’ as It Mirrored Real Life Struggles

In a new interview with The Messenger, the actress said that the fictional role she was playing on television quickly started to feel very familiar. “Straight from the beginning it was like, I’m dating a football player, Juliette dates a football player,” she said of her character.

“And then they turned her into an alcoholic. Then, they turned to her leaving her daughter and going to this crazy [place] in Europe,” Panettiere continued. “And it was very obvious … they weren’t doing their homework. They weren’t creating new story lines.”

“They were just looking at my life and going, ‘Oh, let’s just take what she’s going through and put our little spin on it,'” she continued. “And then, ta-da! It’s done and done.”

Since the show wrapped in 2018, Panettiere has been open about her struggles with alcohold and drug addiction, which led to her daughter Kaya moving to Ukraine for a while with her ex, Wladimir Klitschko.

The storylines hewed so close to her personal life that the actress said it was “very traumatizing.” She added, “I felt like I was acting out my own life.”

She said the end of that show in 2018 helped open her eyes to a lot of things that were wrong in her life, including the team of people she had around her. Describing those years as lonely, Panettiere said she realized, “people aren’t trying to protect me. They’re trying to protect themselves.”

Noting that some of these people had represented her since she was 13 years old, Panettiere said she felt she’d been “trained my whole life to trust and listen to and take advice from” them. “It was a terrifying thing to do to finally make that switch,” she said.

After several years of personal struggles, Panettiere got sober in 2021. She told Red Table Talk the following year that she felt “horribly guilty” when her daughter moved to Ukraine to live with her father, but called it “the most unselfish thing” she could do at the time so she could work on herself. Kaya still lives with her father.

Sometimes, Panettiere said she wonders how her life might have turned out differently had she not taken Nashville so quickly after her breakout role on Heroes. “If I hadn’t had done that — if I hadn’t accepted Nashville and had all that time to be involved with other projects — then where would I be now?” she mused.

“It took six years of my career when I was at my physical prime, my mental, my everything, that I just wonder what it would have been like in the hiatuses, [if I] did one project or film, or was encouraged to do that,” she pondered. “Where would I be today?”

Following Nashville, Panettiere also took a break from her acting career while working on her sobriety. Following a voice cameo in 2022’s fifth Scream film, she marked her official return to acting by reprising her role as Kirby Reed in the 2023 sequel Scream VI.