Hayden Panettiere is making a comeback after stepping out of the spotlight the past few years due to personal struggles. She’s reprising her role as Kirby Reed in the upcoming Scream VI. It’s very unclear exactly how that will happen considering the events of Scream 4, but we’ll see. Last year, Hayden started opening up about getting out of an abusive relationship and giving up custody of her daughter. Now she’s speaking to Women’s Health about her struggles with alcohol and sleep deprivation:
On struggling with alcoholism: “I was being told how to be and how to live by so many people in my life,” she says. “I wanted certain decisions to be my own, and nobody could stop me. What I put in my body was like an act of defiance.” Her drinking ramped up in 2014 after giving birth to her daughter and dealing with crippling postpartum depression. “I should have gone on antidepressants [to cope with the postpartum depression], but you have to find the right one that works for you,” she says. “They don’t mix well with alcohol, and I wasn’t ready to stop drinking.”
On her personal struggles being written into her TV storyline: “They wrote my character as having postpartum depression,” says Hayden, whose daughter was going back and forth between Nashville and Ukraine (with her father) at the time. “They wrote that she abandoned her child and went to a different country. And it was very difficult to go on-set and to act out these feelings about these things that I was truly going through in my real life.”
On sleep deprivation: Hayden eventually left the industry and the public eye to work on herself but returned to drinking to manage anxiety. That’s when her physical health caved. “I struggled with sleep deprivation,” she says. “Sleep is massive. It affects your motor skills, your ability to think, and your overall health.” “My body was like, ‘enough,’” she continues. “I hit 30. My face was swollen. I had jaundice. My eyes were yellow. I had to go to a liver specialist. I was holding on to weight that wasn’t normally there. My hair was thin and coming out in clumps.” She went back to treatment in 2021, enrolled in a 12-step program, and even went to trauma therapy.
So Hayden did this interview in January before her younger brother’s recent passing. My gosh, Hayden has really been through it. The way she describes her journey into alcoholism is very clear. She was a child star and wanted some measure of control over her own life as soon as she was able to take it. And the cycle with the postpartum depression and unwillingness to take anti-depressants is sad but also understandable: she didn’t want to give up alcohol, which she knew gave her comfort. I knew she went to rehab and was vaguely aware that Nashville recreated that storyline with her character, but I didn’t realize they drew so liberally from Hayden’s personal struggles for her character. It’s truly cruel that they included things like her postpartum depression and her custody dispute. It would be one thing if she was okay with it because she wanted to increase awareness, but that wasn’t the case and those writers are cruel hacks. Also, I knew sleep deprivation was a big deal, but I didn’t realize it could have some of the effects Hayden described. I slept two hours last night so I’m taking that as a personal cautionary tale. Anyway, Hayden does seem like she’s in a much better place these days and looking toward the future and moving forward. I hope she has additional support in light of the death of her brother.
photos credit: Darla Khazei/INSTARimages.com/Cover Images, Getty images and Women’s Health via Instagram
I loved Nashvilles first few seasons.
Juliette & Avery? Hot hot hot.
But after finding out they used her own personal trauma as a storyline, the show paled for me.
As for sleep deprivation, whew! I suffer insomnia too. I’ve been awake since 12:30 am, it’s a crazy life coping through the haze of little sleep.
I hope she keeps on this track, & I was very sorry to read about her poor brother. She’s had more than enough trauma.
I have always liked her from Heroes. She was a good actress and cute in a girl next door way. My heart goes out to her for what she has been through. Her smile still looks forced. She still looks sad. I don’t know if these photos were from before her brother passed or not. Give her strength.
I almost forgot about Heroes,
Save the cheerleader, save the world.
That first season was tv perfection.
She does look sad. Let’s pray her abusive ex doesn’t try to manipulate her again because she’s mourning her brother.
I have no personal knowledge of whether she experienced abuse during her child acting years. However I suspect she might have given how often this happens to child performers. I hope she finds a lasting peace and can move forward to a better place.
Never watched the show, but yikes at those writers! Did they know all of this while writing the show? Please tell me some of it is coincidental. It’s one thing to find out your actor has a great singing voice or can do backflips or something and write that in. But taking it to this extreme personal level is highly questionable.
I took her description of her health problems to mean that they were a result of both alcohol abuse and sleep deprivation not just sleep deprivation! I mean I know how sh*tty I feel after a bad night’s sleep and how much more susceptible to getting migraines, catching viruses, being moody and emotional and fuzzy-brained, but I don’t know that it can necessarily cause liver issues and hair loss, etc.
Also I know the answer, but why does the cover of women’s health have to always be someone showing their abs?
Cause bullshit, but also because the abdomen is the one part of the body where the muscle structure isn’t supported by bone. It’s a pretty common nonverbal marker of a certain appearance of “health”.
Now – for authentic health, we can have a whole conversation about how appearing slender or skinny are terrible clues to a person’s actual health, power; vitality or well being.
Hayden, for instance, has spent so much of her life in various unhealthy states, I find it hard to believe she’s actually healthy here. She may be healthier than *she* has been in a long time (or possibly ever), but given all that she’s been going through since becoming an adult (hell, since becoming a child actor), her abs aren’t saying much of anything here (except maybe “Read the story of my journey.” That’s where the real value is).
Poor Hayden 🙁 sounds like she has been through hell.
This is my PSA that if you, an older family member or especially a child suffer from insomnia, to demand a sleep study. Insomnia = an inability to fall asleep or stay asleep. You probably have to see an ENT, pulmonologist or sleep neurologist to get an in lab study. Doctors used to think this disease only existed in fat old white men only and dismissed the possibility in everyone else, until fairly recently. Sadly they are finding it in more and more young people and even babies, toddlers and young kids. My story is I look like Amy Poehler and doctors were so dismissive of my issues, because I look healthy, thin, and “that’s an old person’s disease.”
Your body always wants you to sleep and sleep well, but when your airway is collapsing while you sleep then either your brain subconsciously associates sleep with bad things, or your brain will wake up in the night due to the stress of an apnea, or even due to the stress of low oxygen. Alcohol and opiates increase the chance of apneas, where you stop breathing completely, which can lead to a much higher risk of heart attack, stroke, car accidents, diabetes, and high blood pressure as well as weight gain.
Check on yourself and your loved ones, CBers! Enough and good quality sleep is so important and key to all of us having sanity and physical health, but sometimes our bodies get in the way. And I hope Hayden can get good help to deal with all she has suffered.
Alcohol causes issues with sleep so it isn’t surprising that she struggled with sleep deprivation. I hope she’s in a better place now.
Thank you! Alcohol use can prevent you from sleeping well. The problem gets compounded when people think their inability to sleep needs some type of meds to “fix” it (even more alcohol!), rather than seeing the link between alcohol and insomnia. I’ve seen it in my own family, I wish more people could be made aware of the link between the two.
She looks really uncomfortable in these photos.
Doesn’t she though?
I thought it was just me…
I feel so sorry for her. She’s been through so much. I hope she finds the healing, peace and happiness she needs.