The once prolific actress took a five year hiatus while her personal life became tabloid fodder. But now that she’s survived her demons, returning to her most empowering role provided the best comeback.
Scream 4, released in 2011, introduced us to Hayden Panetierre’s Kirby—the cool-girl film nerd, always armed with a barbed quip and film trivia to make sure you know she knows more than you. It was left ambiguous at the end of the film whether Kirby made it or not, but her survival was made explicit in the fifth film, when Kirby’s number appears on Deputy Dewey’s phone and a blink-and you’ll-miss-it thumbnail of Panettiere shows up in a YouTube interview with Woodsboro survivor Kirby Reed.
In Scream VI, adult Kirby retains much the same qualities in spades, only now she’s an FBI special agent focusing on the Ghostface killings in particular. Playing an adult version of Kirby was exciting, Panettiere says, because she always felt like Kirby would never be a victim. “I was so excited to find out where they were taking Kirby because trauma can do different things to different people. Trauma can cause certain people to be terrified, afraid of their own shadows, put 10 locks on their doors, have their own house turned into Fort Knox. Or people can come out fighting,” she continues, “That’s really one of the things that I loved about Kirby, that she’d go straight into ‘I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I want the bad guys to be afraid of me.’”
After some slight misdirection, and a ten-minute period in which Kirby seems like she might be the new Ghostface, that’s exactly what we get from the character in Scream VI. For this to be Panettiere’s first role post surviving her own demons feels poetic—a place for her to explore what she was in the first half of her career and what she worked through during her self-imposed hiatus. While it’s something she initially considered in relation to Kirby, it’s something she also thinks comes with age. “As we get older, we have more experience in our lives. There’s not a whole lot that we end up not being able to relate to at one point or another. It doesn’t have to be the exact same thing, but you become familiar with the feeling of it. That makes it a heck of a lot easier and more therapeutic,” she says.
For much of the past two decades, Hayden Panettiere hasn’t been far from the pop culture zeitgeist. Aughts comedy-drama enthusiasts remember her work as a child star in Raising Helen, with Kate Hudson, or Remember the Titans. To comic book nerds of a certain age, she was the centerpiece of NBC’s superhero series Heroes. She’d later extend her network TV reign as the troubled but loving country crooner on ABC’s Nashville. And then there’s Kirby, her most fondly remembered, star-making turn in 2011. But much of what people know about Panettiere was what appeared in the tabloid headlines, about a fraught relationship, addiction, and abuse since that turn. Her much-hyped returning as Kirby to the horror franchise she first joined 12 years ago marks the end of a five year-acting hiatus.
For Panettiere, now 33, picking the perfect role to reintroduce herself to an industry she’s been a part of since she was five years-old was crucial. She muses about this as we talk over Zoom, dressed in a plain black t-shirt, fussing with her bangs every once in a while. “I felt like I had this great blank canvas to work with, where I had my name and my history as an actress. As an actor, that doesn’t go away, but I had taken enough time off that I felt like I could go in whatever direction I wanted to with my career,” she says.
Learning that her character Kirby survived the events of Scream 4 in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s 2022’s reboot Scream 5 presented the perfect opportunity for her to open up the next chapter. “Every project that came in, I was like, ‘This is not the one. It’s not the one.’ Then when Scream came along it calmed my nerves because I had played Kirby before. There was a familiarity there that just made me feel at home and at ease. I’m so glad that I waited.”
Scream VI was released to critical acclaim, particularly for the return of Kirby in all her spunky, sarcastic glory. Even on a computer screen, Panettiere is glowing and radiant, with a smokier voice than fans of her mid-aughts work might expect, gesturing often with perfectly done nails. She describes her return to the franchise as “new but old” which also feels like a potential mantra for the resurgence of her career. Returning to Scream brought back a flood of memories, like celebrating her 21st birthday with a huge party with her cast mates in Ann Arbor, and working with franchise creator Wes Craven before his death. “He was a genius at teaching you how to make a horror film– how important the timing of the scare was,” Panettiere recalls. “That scene in Scream 4 where I’m walking towards the closet, he was like, ‘It might feel very slow to you, like you’re walking too slow, but trust me, it has to be that perfect scary moment.’”
Panettiere has been through her fair share of very public life trials and tribulations. She’s had two very public relationships—one that ended in her giving up custody of her daughter to her ex-heavyweight boxing champion ex-partner, Wladimir Klitschko, after a tumultuous relationship with Brian Hickerson that led the actress to speak openly about the domestic violence she experienced with him, alongside her drug and alcohol addiction. In recent interviews, she’s talked about how much of this was the impetus for her to seek treatment and take her acting break.
Much like other highly-paparazzied celebrities, Panettiere could choose the silent route, standing her ground and making her private life private. Instead she’s chosen to speak openly about her struggles with drugs and alcohol, abusive relationships, and postpartum depression. Part of that openness, she says, comes from a desire to reclaim her own narrative. “I do find that if I don’t talk about it, if we don’t say anything about it, they’re going to say something anyway. They’re going to fill in the blanks for you. They’re going to take a wild guess as to what’s really going on and it’s not going to be the truth.”
The thinking makes sense for someone who has been a public figure for nearly her whole life, but in many ways it’s more complicated than that. Aside from wanting to tell her own truth, Panettiere gravitates towards wanting to help people, clearly reflected in her activist work with animal rights, domestic violence, and most recently her work with Hoplon International in raising funds for Ukraine. She sees that drive as something that comes directly from her father, Skip. “It’s an amazing feeling to not be doing something as an actor, but being there, helping just as a human being. My dad was a cop in Harlem and then retired as a lieutenant in the fire department in New York City. Maybe I get that from him. He was my hero growing up,” she says.
Being honest about what’s going on in her own life is a precedent she’s been setting since Nashville, when the writers wrote Panettiere’s real-life pregnancy into the storyline during season 3. Reality began to blur as Panettiere’s own life reflected Juliette’s. “The first time that it came out of my mouth, I didn’t even plan on talking about it. It was when I said on a talk show, I said, ‘I went through postpartum too.’ We were talking about Juliette Barnes on the show, and nobody knew that I was going to say it. I believe honesty is the best policy, and I’m proud of where I’ve been, I’m proud of how far I’ve come. On my journey, I realized how many people have struggled the way that I have. People need to know that and hear that from the people they look up to.”
With Scream VI’s success, Panettiere is solidly in her next era, but what does that look like for her? She wants to do more comedy. She’s always done her own stunts so why not an action movie? One thing she rules out is an album, or the upcoming Nashville U.K. reunion tour in Fall 2023 – due to her fear of “standing on stage and singing live.” But she concedes that she would be into a project that allows her to sing again. Above all else, she’s excited to finally be able to take control over her career. “I can’t even express how good it feels, how empowering it feels. I spent a lot of my career and my life listening to other people tell me what to do, what to wear, what to say, how to say it –everything but be yourself.”
“I still am learning how to do that and how to feel comfortable doing that,” Panettiere says. “It wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I’ve had to remind myself that it’s okay, nobody’s going to be mad at me.”
Category: Scream VI
March Interviews: Entertainment Tonight & E! News
Hayden’s Interview for The New York Times
The “Scream” actress opens up about reprising her role in the franchise, becoming sober and grieving the death of her brother.
LOS ANGELES — Hayden Panettiere has always been a survivor.
She survived being a child actor in the early 2000s when the media obsessively treated the lives of young women as entertainment fodder; she survived early adulthood in the 2010s when she starred in the popular soap opera “Nashville,” a role that mirrored her own issues with postpartum depression and substance abuse; and she survived the aggressive tabloid coverage of her daughter’s move to Ukraine after her father was granted custody of her.
Recently Ms. Panettiere, 33, found herself in survival mode once again, because of grief. About three weeks before the release of “Scream VI,” in which she reprises her character Kirby Reed, her brother, Jansen Rane Panettiere, died at 28. He was an actor and budding artist, and he died from heart complications, her family said in February.
Ms. Panettiere tried to push through the press tour for the film in New York, but on March 6, two days before her brother’s funeral, she could sit through only one interview. She canceled the rest of her appearances, aside from the premiere.
On an overcast morning in late March in her Los Angeles condominium, Ms. Panettiere reflected on the past month of her life. Her brother’s ashes were atop a mantel, across from which she posed for a portrait in a Christian Siriano dress. She stood in front of a canvas teeming with hidden words, which her brother had created for her.
“I always see a few secret messages that maybe he meant to put there, maybe he didn’t,” she said. Mr. Panettiere was working on it when he died. “His art, that was the thing that made him happiest,” she said, her voice cracking.
After the photo shoot, Ms. Panettiere climbed the spiral staircase in her living room and curled up under a blanket on her velvet sofa in the lofted part of her condo. Her home is “the last place my whole family ever lived together” before her parents separated, she said.
Ms. Panettiere, who was born and raised in New York, has lived most of her life in the public eye. She landed her first gig in a commercial at 11 months old and was a child actor in films like “Remember the Titans” and “Bring It On: All or Nothing” and TV shows like “Guiding Light” and “Ally McBeal.”
She said her parents gave her a great childhood where she was able to attend prom and play sports, though she was always working. “I don’t think I really had a lot of time to be a kid,” she said. “I would miss these pockets of time, and because of that, it wasn’t easy for me as a young girl to slide back into a friend group and to belong.”
She solidified her place in Hollywood through roles like Claire Bennet in “Heroes,” the high school cheerleader with special powers; Kirby, a quirky horror aficionado, in “Scream IV”; and Juliette Barnes, a troubled country diva, in “Nashville.”
But in her private life, she struggled. When she was 18, her parents separated, and she ended up in the midst of an eight-year divorce battle. There were times, she said, when she felt like she had to choose one parent over the other and would end up staying by herself or with Wladimir Klitschko, an ex-boxer whom she dated on and off between 2009 and 2018.
“Of course, kids are always caught in the middle,” Ms. Panettiere said. “But my relationship with my parents now is good and even more special to me, because we lost my brother.”
In 2014, while she was working on “Nashville,” she gave birth to a daughter, Kaya (Mr. Klitschko is the father) and began suffering from postpartum depression. Ms. Panettiere said she turned to alcohol and opioids to self-medicate.
She ended up leaving “Nashville” during the fourth season in 2015 to go to a treatment facility for her depression. In 2018, when the show ended, her daughter went to live with her father, Mr. Klitschko, in Ukraine. Ms. Panettiere said she sees Kaya as much as she can (Kaya and Mr. Klitschko live in an undisclosed location since the war broke out last year).
Ms. Panettiere said that many of her real-life experiences were reflected in the show’s script while she was going through them, which was traumatizing. But there wasn’t much she could do about its story lines, and she had spent most of her life doing what she was told by those who had power over her. “Even if something was too much for me, I would never admit to it,” she said. “It was always about making them happy.”
The demand of her career took its toll. “When I went home after acting out what I was really going through, the last thing I wanted to do was properly manage or talk about what I was feeling in a healthy way,” she said. “So I turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms.”
That meant cocktails with friends and hiding under the covers and pouring herself a drink almost every day. Her life, she said, could be summed up by the adage “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
In some ways, Ms. Panettiere said, her tumultuous behavior stemmed from the time she lost in growing up as a child actor. “I wanted that control back,” she said. “I wanted to do things I wasn’t supposed to do, and I wanted to just let go and act like a kid.”
Ms. Panettiere said that at some point she couldn’t recognize herself in the mirror anymore. “My eyes were yellow,” she said, adding that doctors told her that her liver was failing and she was septic. She was 27 at the time and would wake up shaking, needing an entire bottle of alcohol to get through the day. She would often swap in opioids to stave off drinking alcohol, she said.
In 2021, Ms. Panettiere re-entered a treatment center for eight months. She has been sober for almost two years, now swapping substances for Peloton rides and organic meals, and has deleted most of the photos from her time deep in addiction, except for one.
Why? “To remind myself what I looked like,” she said. “The fact that I thought I looked OK at that time is the scariest part to me.”
At the height of her addiction, she dated Brian Hickerson on and off for about four years. In 2021, he pleaded no contest to two felony counts of injuring the actress and served time in jail. Mr. Hickerson was in the condo during our interview, walking around, vacuuming and shooting a basketball through the hoop in her living area.
Both Ms. Panettiere and Mr. Hickerson became sober and later reconnected as friends. During the photo shoot, Ms. Panettiere called him “babe” a handful of times. When asked if they were dating again, she was hesitant to define their relationship, but said, “There are feelings there, yes.”
She added that she doesn’t condone what he did. “He knows he deserved what happened to him,” Ms. Panettiere said, referring to his arrest and jail time. She noted that their relationship was “contingent on him continuing on this road of recovery,” and she is self-conscious about how people may perceive her letting him back into her life. “I did not do any of this lightly,” she said.
When Ms. Panettiere heard “Scream V” was in the works, her team reached out to see if she could be involved in the film. It was too late, but Ms. Panettiere ended up connecting with one of the sixth film’s executive producers, Kevin Williamson, with whom she had done “Scream IV.” Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directors of “Scream V,” wanted to bring Ms. Panettiere back for that movie but “felt like we’d be forcing her character in as a cameo,” they wrote in an email. Instead they had her return for a more fully fledged part in the next film.
Ms. Panettiere had some anxiety about returning to set as she struggled to remember her lines. “I used to memorize things like that, within two seconds,” she said, snapping. “Suddenly it was taking me hours to memorize something. It was like that muscle atrophied, so I was terrified.”
Fans of Ms. Panettiere’s singing on “Nashville” will be happy to know that the thought of making an album has crossed her mind. “I would love to do that one day and really do it right,” she said. Ms. Panettiere also said she’d love to take on more comedy or action roles.
Perhaps Ms. Panettiere might even make an appearance in another future “Scream” movie. When she initially took on the role of Kirby, she did it with the contingency that her character’s fate was left open-ended. “I was stabbed, but you never saw me die,” she said, laughing.
Scream VI: Behind the Scenes
I’ve managed to add behind the scenes photos of Hayden on set of her latest film ‘Scream VI‘ back in 2022. Check out also a video of Hayden shared by her co-star Jasmin Savoy.
(2023) “Scream VI > Behind the Scenes
(2023) “Scream VI > On Set | 2022 [Jasmin Savoy Insta] | Screen Captures
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Gallery Updates
Hey everyone. I’ve been adding some content of Hayden promoting ‘Scream VI’ throughout March, as well, outtakes from a photo shoot she did with Storm Santos back in 2022. Take a look:
2023 > Scream VI Press Tour | March
ON TV > TALKSHOWS & INTERVIEWS > ‘Good Morning America’ | March 6, 2023
‘Scream VI’ Interviews
“Scream VI” World Premiere
On monday night, March 6, Hayden attended the Paramount’s “Scream VI” World Premiere in New York City.
PREMIERES > 2023 > Paramount’s “Scream VI” World Premiere in New York City | March 6
Hayden stops by ‘Good Morning America’ Studios
This past monday, March 6, Hayden kept herself busy as she promoted her latest film ‘Scream VI‘. She stopped by the ‘Good Morning America‘ studios in the morning and later that night, she attended it’s world premiere, in New York City.
2023 > Arriving to the ‘Good Morning America’ studios in New York City | March 6
INTERVIEWS > 2023 > ‘Good Morning America’ | March (2023) “Scream VI > Sneak Peek (Good Morning America)