Hayden Panettiere is ready to share her truth, all of it. The 36-year-old former Nashville star is preparing to release her tell-all memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, through Grand Central Publishing on May 19. In a preview chat with US Weekly, she got candid about the book’s chapters on her difficult child actor years, several high-profile relationships and her multiple trips to rehab.
She also comes out as bisexual, revealing that she wasn’t comfortable discussing her sexuality in public until now.
“That’s something about me I was never able to share with the world, because it was just never the right time,” she said of her attraction to women. “It was either I was too young, and I was being forced to be perfect at all times. I was not encouraged to just be myself. Then came the period where it felt like people coming out, especially women, saying that they were bisexual or liked girls, was a fad. I was afraid that if I was honest, it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon. It was a very difficult topic to articulate properly. It’s sad I had to wait until I was 36 years old to share that part of me, but better late than never, right?”
She said she has not yet fallen in love with a woman, but has tried dating, though, like so many things in her life, that was complicated by the constant presence of swarming paparazzi. Panettiere said it was “scary” trying to dip her toe into the same-sex dating pool because photographers were always following her and she had very little privacy.
“I have dated women. I was much more into women even as a child than I was men,” she told the magazine. “I have explored it, but because I hadn’t shared this with anybody, I didn’t really have the courage to throw myself fully emotionally into it. Because then if I did fall in love, that wasn’t something that I wanted to ever have to hide.”
As for how she would label herself, the actress said with the book coming out she’s able to confidently say, “Yes, I am bisexual. i said it! This is the first time I got to say it out loud.”
In the book, Panettiere — who scored her first, and only Billboard-charting song in 2012 with the debut single from the ABC series Nashville, “Telescope,” which peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart and No. 36 on the Hot Country Songs chart — also delves into her painful breakups with former Heroes costar Milo Ventimiglia and fiance and former heavyweight boxing champ Wladimir Klitschko.
She describes being doing press for Heroes at 16 and having someone give her non-prescribed “happy pills” from Mexico and then later turning to alcohol to deal with undiagnosed postpartum depression following the birth of her now-11-year-old daughter with Klitschko, Kaya; Klitschko later demanded that Panettiere give up custody of Kaya and let her live with him in his native Ukraine. It also covers her three trips to rehab and the struggles she had on the set of Nashville, where for six seasons she played bubbly country singer Juliette Barnes.
She says that when the showrunners realized that she was good at getting to difficult emotional places, “they constantly wanted to write that in. And I definitely did not expect that I would be crying that often. I went in thinking, I’m going to play a country music star. This is going to be fun. I didn’t know until I was already in the experience that, oh my gosh, in this episode I’m an alcoholic, and the next, I’m dealing with postpartum depression. This week I have to abandon my child and, gosh, this all sounds oddly familiar.”
As her story lines on the shows became more real, Panettiere developed a prescription pill dependency that was so bad she began falling asleep in the makeup chair. Shockingly, she said nobody on set seemed to care or realize that the ripped-from-the-headlines stories were hitting way too close to home.
“They cared if the way it was affecting me had a negative impact on filming or on the show. But there was very little concern about my mental and emotional state,” she said. “I was also very good at hiding my feelings. One of the things I was really good at when I was younger was jumping in and out of the character between action and cut. But with this character, I turned into Juliette Barnes. Juliette Barnes was me. I didn’t know where Hayden started and Juliette ended. Very few people took the time to come up to me and ask if I was OK. I don’t know that they wanted to know.”
Check out the dates for Panettiere’s This Is Me: A Reckoning book tour below.
