Hayden Panettiere Says ‘Nashville’ Writers Were Riffing on Her Life

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | January 26, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | January 26, 2024 |

Hayden Panettiere has long been open about her struggles with alcoholism and depression, and she’s digging in ahead of her A Conversation With Hayden Panettiere tour. She spoke about her time filming Nashville in a recent interview with The Messenger, calling those years “very traumatizing because I felt like I was acting out my own life.”

Panettiere portrayed Juliette Barnes, a country singer struggling to balance her career and personal life as she rose to fame for six seasons, from 2012-18.

“Straight from the beginning, it was like, I’m dating a football player, [and then] Juliette dates a football player. 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 had to relinquish the custody of her daughter to her ex, Wladimir Klitschko, and send her to live with him in Ukraine, in 2018 amidst her struggles with addiction.

She said it got to a point where it became “very obvious” that the Nashville writers were being inspired by the events of her real life.

“They weren’t doing their homework. They weren’t creating new storylines. 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. And then, ta-da! It’s done and done.”

But because of the strain of the shooting schedule and the stress of her personal life, she said she “didn’t have time to take care” of herself or to “think about and go through the pain” she was “experiencing physically [and] emotionally.”

“I would have the shakes when I woke up and could only function with sipping alcohol,” she said of when she was at her lowest. “It was the hardest thing I ever had to do. But I wanted to be a good mom to her—and sometimes that means letting them go.”

After giving up custody of her daughter she went to rehab, and now she’s “just so grateful to be part of this world again,” and says she “will never take it for granted again.”