The young actress had experience under her belt, but still wasn’t confident the role was hers
Hayden Panettiere has fond memories of her time on Malcolm in the Middle.
The actress was just 14 years old when she landed the role of Jessica, a spirited babysitter with bouncy blond curls to match, who catches the eye of boy genius Malcolm (Frankie Muniz) in the show’s 4th season.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Panettiere, 36, remembers auditioning for the role, saying, “I only got the role because Bryan Cranston was directing.“
“I remember the whole audition process… That is my true belief, because he was an actor. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re so wrong for this. But we’re going to make it work,’ ” she shares.
“That was the first time I had ever experienced someone really taking a chance on me,” the Heroes actress continues.
Cranston, 69, also had a special connection to Panettiere’s family, having costarred with Hayden’s mom, Lesley Vogel, in the soap opera Loving in 1984.
“My mom also played his wife in Loving, the soap opera Loving, way back when,” she remembers, “So I went into the audition, and I did the audition, and I looked at him and I said, ‘Can you please come and say hi to my mother?’ And of course, like, he can see how this might play out.“
“He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to say no, but he was expecting to go out into the waiting room and meet some crazy stage mom who had a massive crush on him,” she laughs.
“It was to the point that all the producers and the casting director and everyone followed him out into the green room, and he saw my mom, and my mom just said, ‘Hi, Bryan.’ It took him a second, but just to see his face go from, ‘Who are you? How do I know you?’ to ‘Oh my God,’ it was really special,” explains the Nashville star.
Panettiere already had a lot of acting under her belt, having appeared in seven films and stints on TV shows like Guiding Light and One Life to Live. It was the character of Jessica she was drawn to, however, because it was “so different from the way I knew people saw me.”
“[It wasn’t] the normal role that you would see me in, but to play a completely out-of-the-box character was so much fun. I loved it, I love comedy, and I hope to do more comedy in my career,” she shares.
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