Hayden Panettiere seems to be slowly easing back into Hollywood and her career after being away from several years due to personal struggles. She started doing interviews where she opened up about her sobriety journey and giving up custody of her daughter. She also reprised her role in Scream VI, which was released in March, but had to step back from the press tour due to the sudden death of her younger brother. This interview with The New York Times seems like it was originally meant to be part of the Scream promo, but it was rescheduled after Hayden’s personal tragedy. She talks more about her struggles with alcohol and the current state of her relationship with Brian Hickerson.

The demand of her career took its toll. “When I went home after acting out what I was really going through, the last thing I wanted to do was properly manage or talk about what I was feeling in a healthy way,” she said. “So I turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

That meant cocktails with friends and hiding under the covers and pouring herself a drink almost every day. Her life, she said, could be summed up by the adage “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

In some ways, Ms. Panettiere said, her tumultuous behavior stemmed from the time she lost in growing up as a child actor. “I wanted that control back,” she said. “I wanted to do things I wasn’t supposed to do, and I wanted to just let go and act like a kid.”

Ms. Panettiere said that at some point she couldn’t recognize herself in the mirror anymore. “My eyes were yellow,” she said, adding that doctors told her that her liver was failing and she was septic. She was 27 at the time and would wake up shaking, needing an entire bottle of alcohol to get through the day. She would often swap in opioids to stave off drinking alcohol, she said.

In 2021, Ms. Panettiere re-entered a treatment center for eight months. She has been sober for almost two years, now swapping substances for Peloton rides and organic meals, and has deleted most of the photos from her time deep in addiction, except for one.
Why? “To remind myself what I looked like,” she said. “The fact that I thought I looked OK at that time is the scariest part to me.”

At the height of her addiction, she dated Brian Hickerson on and off for about four years. In 2021, he pleaded no contest to two felony counts of injuring the actress and served time in jail. Mr. Hickerson was in the condo during our interview, walking around, vacuuming and shooting a basketball through the hoop in her living area.

Both Ms. Panettiere and Mr. Hickerson became sober and later reconnected as friends. During the photo shoot, Ms. Panettiere called him “babe” a handful of times. When asked if they were dating again, she was hesitant to define their relationship, but said, “There are feelings there, yes.”

She added that she doesn’t condone what he did. “He knows he deserved what happened to him,” Ms. Panettiere said, referring to his arrest and jail time. She noted that their relationship was “contingent on him continuing on this road of recovery,” and she is self-conscious about how people may perceive her letting him back into her life. “I did not do any of this lightly,” she said.

[From The New York Times]

Hayden alluded to the toll alcohol took on her liver in her Women’s Health interview, but this interview was the first time she plainly confirms how much she was drinking. She was septic and in liver failure due to alcohol. Thankfully, she was able to get healthy and come back from that and seems to now be in a much better place health wise. But what’s more concerning is the extent to which Brian Hickerson is still in her life. There were multiple abusive incidents throughout their relationship, he pleaded no contest to two felony counts for hurting her, and he was in jail. Last summer, she said she was single, but they were friends, but they’ve been in this cycle for years. And the NYT’s description of him wandering in and out of the interview seems a bit ominous. Abusers don’t just stop abusing because they get sober; there are plenty of teetotaler abusers. I really hope how Hayden’s presenting it is how it actually is, and that she’s okay.

photos credit: Darla Khazei/INSTARimages.com/Cover Images, Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon