The actress opened up about shooting the show during a difficult point in her personal life.
Hayden Panettiere is looking back at her time on the TV drama Nashville, reflecting on the emotional toll it took on her mental health.
The Heroes alum recently sat down for an interview with The Messenger -- ahead of her A Conversation With Hayden Panettiere tour -- and recalled how her struggles with alcohol and depression seemed to inform her character on the show.
According to Panettiere, 34, the years she spent shooting Nashville were "very traumatizing because I felt like I was acting out my own life."
In the series, Panettiere played Juliette Barnes, a rising country music singer in the titular city who struggles to balance her personal life with her professional fame. The series ran for six seasons from 2012 to 2018.
"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," Panettiere said. "Then they turned to her leaving her daughter and going to this crazy [place] in Europe."
Panettiere claims that it became "very obvious" to her that the show's writers were looking to her real life for inspiration.
"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,'" she said. "And then, ta-da! It's done and done."
Because of the long shooting days and the strain of her fictional character dealing with the same struggles she was facing off set, Panettiere said she "didn't have time to take care of myself [and] to think about and go through the pain I was experiencing physically [and] emotionally."
In July 2022, Panettiere spoke to People about hitting her lowest point of alcohol abuse ahead of her daughter Kaya's move to Ukraine to live with Panettiere's ex-fiancé, Wladimir Klitschko.
"I would have the shakes when I woke up and could only function with sipping alcohol," she said. "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."
Despite suffering from depression, Panettiere told People that she "never had the feeling that I wanted to harm my child, but I didn't want to spend any time with her." As for her relationship with Klitschko, whom she split from for good in 2018, she shared, "He didn't want to be around me. I didn't want to be around me. But with the opiates and alcohol I was doing anything to make me feel happy for a moment. Then I'd feel worse than I did before. I was in a cycle of self-destruction."
The actress later spent eight months in rehab, a place she credits to giving her the tools she needed to "get over the hump" of her addiction. "It's an everyday choice, and I'm checking in with myself all the time," she explained. "But I'm just so grateful to be part of this world again, and I will never take it for granted again."
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