Now come the real acts of public mourning.
A young star with a painful public history is gone, and suddenly Hollywood’s familiar chorus appears: famous friends and former colleagues declaring themselves stunned, heartbroken and devastated.
Spare us.
Anyone who watched Hayden Panettiere during her promotional rounds just three months earlier, as she discussed her memoir while appearing fragile and distant, could see that something seemed deeply wrong.
Still, as she appeared with Gayle King, the hosts of The View and podcast personality Jay Shetty, the tone around her remained carefully upbeat, as though there was nothing to question and no reason for concern.
Her voice was flat and subdued. At moments, her speech sounded unsteady. Her stare seemed vacant. To many viewers, she looked less like a celebrity calmly promoting a book than a woman carrying visible pain — especially given her well-documented struggles with alcohol and substance abuse, issues she addressed in This is Me: A Reckoning.
Viewers who saw Hayden Panettiere during her appearance on Jay Shetty’s podcast, part of a press tour three months ago, were left wondering whether the actress was in a worrying place.
Her eyes appeared glassy, and her demeanor on camera led some viewers to believe she was emotionally overwhelmed. She is pictured on CBS Mornings in May.
One passage concerned her struggling through postpartum depression while trying to get to work on her network drama Nashville.
‘I rolled over and wiped my eyes, and a dull pain seized my head,’ Panettiere wrote. ‘My stomach turned over, and I sat up, feeling the room start to spin. Oh my God, I need a drink, I thought. If I get a drink now, I can get out of bed and make it to work. It’s 6am, I thought, and I’m trying to get buzzed. The first thing I’d thought of when I woke up was alcohol. I needed a drink to function — at 6am. If I didn’t get some help as soon as possible, I was screwed.’
To suspect that Panettiere may have been using again strikes me as a logical thought. Did anyone say anything in the moment?
It seems not.
King interviewed Panettiere on CBS Mornings on May 18 and asked how she was feeling as she launched her book tour.
Hayden, visibly struggling to enunciate and keep her eyes open:
‘Honestly, I’m always nervous, but this time I’m the rawest version of myself that I’ve ever been.’
That’s one way to put it.
‘I’m not walking out, you know, promoting a project or a character that I played or able to hide behind anything.’
King played along during this lengthy interview. But on Monday, as the news of Panettiere’s death at age 36 dominated the cycle, King had new insight to share.
The real story. Not the fake one she helped promote back in May.
‘It was hard when she was here that day,’ King said on air. ‘When she was here in the studio… and I was talking to her off-camera, she was saying she felt that she was in a good place. But she was still, clearly still, struggling’.
Of course she was. We all saw it.
Just as we all see Ariana Grande in her new music video looking skeletal.
Her rib cage is protruding through her skin. Somehow, her record company and management thought it advisable to release said video, only for the public to express revulsion and horror.
In the immediate aftermath, her representative issued a flowery statement to People magazine saying that ‘Ariana will be taking a step back from visibility’ – after she completes her Eternal Sunshine tour, currently in London.
After she completes the tour. Money is still to be made, it seems.
If Rod Stewart can cancel his tour over health issues, as he has just done, so can Ariana Grande.
But this is the entertainment industry’s sick ecosystem, propped up by the likes of celebrity-friendly outlets such as People magazine.
It’s all about access. If anyone really told the truth, or dared venture to ask the obvious questions, access to celebrities would be cut off.
Remember Matthew Perry’s press tour for his memoir in late 2022, which was all about how he got clean and sober?
We learned, after his death, that Perry had been an active addict the entire time – which we all knew, because he was slurring his words and was barely able to sit up straight in every TV interview he did.
Not that a single reporter, including the esteemed Diane Sawyer, asked Perry about any of that.
So Jenna Ortega, 23, gives an interview to Esquire in which she says that as a child actor, age nine, she was so afraid to be considered problematic – clearly, so desperate to make it in the industry – that ‘I wasn’t asking for a sip of water. I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.’
How was no one looking out for that little girl? Where were her parents? What about an on-set guardian?
Instead, Ortega – who, like Grande, now seems dangerously thin – blames herself.
‘Maybe that was my mistake,’ Ortega says. ‘Not actually looking after myself.’
She was a child.
Former Nickelodeon child star Jennette McCurdy, who came up at the network alongside Grande, wrote of the alleged abuse she suffered as a child star – and Panettiere was one as well, starting work at 11 months old – in her bestselling memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died.
‘No child is psychologically, emotionally, mentally equipped for the obstacles of child stardom,’ McCurdy told Canada’s CBC in 2022. ‘Even if they have the greatest support system around them.’
Panettiere, who was publicly estranged from her stage mom and was with her abusive boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, at the time of her death, clearly did not have a support system.
Her celebrity peers, however, would like to take this moment to remind everyone that they’re still here – and maybe even attempt a little reputational rehab.
Blake Lively, fresh from attempting to destroy Justin Baldoni’s career: ‘Be. Kind. You never know what others are going through.’
Is she for real?
Panettiere, who was publicly estranged from her stage mom and was with her abusive boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, at the time of her death, clearly did not have a support system.
Actress Connie Britton, whose relationship with Panettiere on the set of Nashville was ‘deeply complicated’ according to the late star’s memoir – because, Panettiere suggested, her character was more popular with the audience than Britton’s – wrote this on Instagram:
‘Bursting with brilliance, shining so bright. I have no words for this sad song. Just heartbreak. I love you girl. Sleep easy now.’
Perhaps nothing can top Selma Blair’s tasteless post:
‘Don’t be gone… I’m dying.’
Even in literal death, Panettiere suffers competition for the spotlight. She may be dead but Blair is dying.
If only the industry told the truth about what that spotlight costs. Assuredly, no one in their right mind would want it.
