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
