Hayden Panettiere dated her Heroes costar, Milo Ventimiglia, when she was 18 and he was 29. On May 6, the actress spoke to Us Weekly about the breakup while promoting her new memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
“Every relationship I’ve ever been in, I invested my whole self in,” she said. “I saw [Ventimiglia] as my partner and that it was going to hopefully keep going and evolving and lead to marriage. But it was a point of contention that I was unable to put the ‘I’ in front of ‘love you’ and at the time, I didn’t realize or understand why it made me feel so uncomfortable. I could only say ‘love you’ in a casual way. Being older, he was much more aware of what that meant. And that said a lot.”
She was then asked about their breakup. Ventimiglia ended the relationship with her, took it back after she took the news so badly, then broke up with her again a week later. However, she believed that he only took her back because she was crying so hard.
“One hundred percent it was only because I was over the toilet, hysterically crying,” she said. “It was like my world had crumbled. It was so out of left field, nothing that big or explosive had happened. Nothing had really gone wrong. Nobody cheated. I remember the look on his face being pure shock at how visceral and massive my negative reaction was, and he immediately took it back.”
In her book, Panettiere also came out as bisexual. “I’ve chosen to be completely brutally honest about this,” she said. “That’s something about me that I was never able to share with the world, because it was just never the right time.”
This Is Me: A Reckoning will be available on May 12.
