Panettiere says she related to many of the struggles endured by her character, the fiery rising star Juliette Barnes — “sometimes a little bit too much.”

Hayden Panettiere knows there’s nothing like the real thing, but some characters and storylines get a little too real.

“When I read this role and I read the scripts I was like, ‘If there’s been a character in my career that I could play and do justice, this is the character,’” Panettiere tells Entertainment Weekly, speaking of her Nashville character Juliette Barnes ahead of the series’ Netflix debut on Monday. “I could relate to her so much, and went through everything that she went through…. It was just a character that had everything that I was dying to portray.“

Fans of Nashville know that Juliette had far and away the most turbulent arc of any character on the series. From a volatile relationship with her addict mother, to her own struggle with substance abuse, to searing storylines dealing with grief, Juliette spent a lot of Nashville in the wringer.

“Like when I was dealing with postpartum depression,” she offers, “the fact that I got to go out there and had to perform through it — it was terrifying, and very emotional.”

Panettiere continues, “There was a lot that I related to, sometimes a little bit too much. It hit really close to home.”

Nashville aired six seasons on ABC and then CMT, from 2012-2018. Though Panettiere was only 22 when she landed the role as the troubled, talented, and fiercely stubborn Juliette, she’d already spent two decades on screen. She joined the core cast of the soap opera One Life to Live at only four years old, and worked steadily through stints on Guiding Light, Heroes, and films like Ice Princess and Remember the Titans until Nashville creator Callie Khouri came calling.

She remembers the early Nashville material as “something that I could really relate to. And to have the singing portion on top of it, it was a dream that came true… I got to combine everything that I love about people and characters and acting and singing. It was my dream come true.“

But over the years, Panettiere has openly expressed conflicting feelings about just how much she could relate to Juliette, and if, perhaps, there were times when life imitating art tipped over into painful cases of art imitating life.

While Nashville was entering its fourth season in 2015, Panettiere, who’d only months before given birth to her daughter Kaya, noted “a lot of misunderstanding” around postpartum depression that she was happy to explore on the series, as Juliette began her own journey through the condition.

“It’s something that’s completely uncontrollable, and it’s really painful and it’s really scary, and women need a lot of support,” she shared.

She had also struggled with substance abuse, something Juliette went on to face. In 2022, the actress revealed she was given “happy pills” at just 15 to keep her alert during interviews. But the pills ultimately served as a “door that would open for me when it came to my addiction.”

That same year, Panettiere elaborated on the connections between her life and Juliette’s life: “When I was on Nashville, they really wrote my life into it. So on the show, one of the storylines was that I was playing an alcoholic. Another storyline was that I was pregnant on the show, and then I got postpartum depression…. So I had to go to work every day and be acting out what I was truly going through.“

Two years later, she referred to Nashville as “very traumatizing, because I felt like I was acting out my own life.”

With a potential Nashville resurgence on the horizon now that the full series will be hitting popular streamer for the first time, Panettiere has moved from a place of fear to a place of pride regarding her turbulent time as Juliette Barnes.

“It’s definitely kept me more in tune with who I am and what’s going on with me. It was kind of like a therapy session sometimes — we get to emote and we get to touch on those points that are topics that are really hard for us. It’s kind of a different way of doing therapy,” she explained. “But it has served me well, and I’m proud of the characters that I have gotten the chance to play, and the topics that I’ve been able to touch on. And I hope to continue to do that.

Though it wasn’t always easy, Panettiere says that if her performance as Juliette “helps somebody out there to not feel so alone and to feel understood, then I’m all for it.“

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