Hayden Panettiere sat down with Jay Shetty recently, and reflected on her time shooting the hit drama series, Nashville. Despite the show’s success, the actress revealed that it came with a cost.
Panettiere, who recently came out as bisexual, discussed how her experience on the series resulted in anxiety and substance abuse.
Around the 50-minute mark of the video below, Panettiere said that her character’s storyline began to share similarities with her personal life, including elements of having postpartum depression and developing alcoholism.
“Then it was like, ‘Okay, you guys are just mirroring my life,’“ she on On Purpose With Jay Shetty.. “And we wouldn't get the episodes very far ahead of time. So to go to them and say, ‘Hey, you got to change this and that.’”
As Nashville continued for six years, Panettiere explained that she “couldn’t come up for air” from her character’s storyline.
“There was no break from it,” Panettiere continued. “And here I was playing this very deeply emotional, dark character. We had so much alike, but we were different in who we were as people.”
Because the now-36-year-old was “becoming [Barnes] constantly,” she lost the ability to “mentally decompress and process” her personal life, which led to panic attacks and drug and alcohol dependency. The entertainer shared that her prior habit of stage fright from “good nerves” evolved into anxiety that made her “incapable of functioning properly or thinking clearly.”
“I was self-medicating and looking for relief at the bottom of a bottle and it was the only thing that worked,” she continued. “But I needed to numb. I needed to self-numb. I needed my brain to take a trip.”
In 2022, Panettiere revealed to People that when she was 15 years old, she was offered “happy pills” before attending red carpet events to make her “peppy during interviews.”
"I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction,” she said.
