A resurfaced CBS Mornings interview shows Hayden Panettiere, 36, breaking down how childhood stardom warped her sense of self.
The interview, taped just three months before her death, captured the New York native discussing her memoir “This Is Me: A Reckoning” with Gayle King. Panettiere began acting before she turned one, landing her first commercial gig at eight months old and racking up 50 commercials by age five. She then joined the cast of ABC soap opera “One Life to Live” as Sarah Roberts, a role she held from 1994 to 1997.
Panettiere described her mother Lesley Vogel, also an actress, as the driving force behind her early career. “It was every moment on set I didn’t care about anybody else’s opinion but my mom’s,” she told King. She added that if her mother was unhappy with her performance, her day was ruined.
The actress traced how her ability to cry on cue became both a professional asset and personal burden. Directors praised the skill, but the mental gymnastics required took a devastating toll. She explained how she began associating deep sadness and catastrophic on-screen scenarios with adult approval, a dynamic that confused her developing sense of identity.
“It went from being a kid and having to imagine just that your pet passed away or something. But then as I got older, the imagery became darker, and darker, and darker,” Panettiere said. “And the emotion that I had to hold within me in order to get those trigger tears going, it became harder and harder to jump out of it. I didn’t know where the my character started and where I ended, you know, just it meshed.”
The explosive fame from “Heroes” and “Nashville” intensified her struggles. Panettiere recalled stepping out of her apartment at 16 for her first major paparazzi encounter, describing the moment as feeling like she was “literally looking down the barrel of a gun.” She noted that photographers during the 2000s operated with “absolutely no boundaries,” hunting her like prey while the intense scrutiny compounded her childhood trauma.
In a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter published in May, Panettiere used even starker language about her upbringing. “I was groomed. I was like a little soldier and I always have been,” she said. “No was never an option. It was just, ‘Here are your scenes, here’s your dialogue, memorize it, hit the marks, do what your director tells you to do.’ I took my marching orders.”
She pinpointed when she recognized the damage: “When I started self-harming in the form of substance abuse,” she told THR. “My people-pleasing had built up and up, it was anger and anxiety and frustration. My life revolved around other people, and I lived to make other people happy and I was the last one on the list,” She added that the pressure “built and built and just exploded.”
On Jay Shetty’s “On Purpose” podcast, Panettiere detailed how her relationship with Vogel lacked any maternal warmth. “Everything was business,” she recalled. “I became the confidant and the assistant and the therapist and the shoulder to cry on and everything but her child.” At 19, while filming “Heroes,” she finally told her mother, “I don’t want us to work together anymore. I just want you to be my mom.” Vogel’s response, Panettiere said, was simply: “You owe me.” She then walked out.
Vogel later said of their estrangement: “We each are entitled to choose our path in life. After 20 years of trauma, chaos, addictions [and] accusations, I felt I had no other option but to choose no contact.”
In the viral moment that preceded her death, Panettiere had been making the press rounds for her May 19 memoir release, giving candid interviews about her bisexuality, her “heartbreaking” decision to allow daughter Kaya to primarily live with ex-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, her battles with alcoholism and postpartum depression, and an alleged encounter at 18 where a friend lured her into a room with a naked famous actor. She said she hoped sharing her stories would “wipe the slate clean” and wrote in her book’s prologue that her traumas had offered her “meaning through a sense of humor, some ridiculous stories, prioritizing my health” and now, “this book.”
Her father Alan Panettiere confirmed her death in a statement to PEOPLE, saying, “It is with profound sadness that we share the tragic passing of our beloved Hayden. She was an incredible light and a force of nature who brought immeasurable love and joy to all who knew her — and to the millions who watched her onscreen.”