Hayden Panettiere recently sat down with Jay Shetty and looked back on her time filming the hit drama series Nashville. While the show was a major success, she admitted it didn’t come without its downsides.
Panettiere, who recently came out as bisexual, opened up about how her experience on the show led to struggles with anxiety and substance abuse.
At around the 50-minute mark of the video below, she explained that her character’s storyline started to closely reflect her real-life experiences, including dealing with 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 ran for six seasons, Hayden Panettiere shared that she felt completely consumed by her character’s storyline, saying she “couldn’t come up for air.”
“There was no break from it,” Panettiere added. “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.”
The now-36-year-old explained that constantly “becoming [Barnes]” made it difficult for her to mentally switch off or process her real-life experiences. This eventually led to panic attacks and struggles with drug and alcohol dependence. She also revealed that what once felt like normal stage fright from “good nerves” gradually turned into overwhelming anxiety, leaving 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.”
Back in 2022, Panettiere told People that at just 15 years old, she had been given “happy pills” before walking red carpets to keep her upbeat 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.
