Hayden Panettiere Deserved Better | Appreciation

The passing of actress Hayden Panettierre at the age of 36 sent a shudder through pop culture spaces.

The former child actress turned network TV star had only recently returned to the spotlight with her candid memoir, “This is Me: A Reckoning,” wherein she spoke with raw honesty about her experiences with entertainment industry tension, postpartum depression and domestic violence. Her comeback was welcomed, an exciting opportunity to see a prodigious talent get her dues. Now, she’s gone, and what is left behind is the work, her words, and an unavoidable sense that she deserved better than she got.

Many actors joke that they’ve been in the business their entire lives but for Panettiere, it was true. She started auditioning for TV commercials when she was barely eight months old. By the age of four, she was starring on the soap opera “One Life to Live”, before jumping ship to its rival, “Guiding Light,” where she got the full soap treatment with plotlines that included kidnapping, PTSD and leukemia. On film, she was the voice of Princess Dot in Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” and starred alongside the likes of Kate Hudson, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in a slew of projects. Back on the small screen, she aged into teen roles in sitcoms like “Malcolm in the Middle,” and she made a name for herself in the world of video games before that became a familiar medium to big-name actors. If you were a kid in the early 2000s then the chances were high that you recognized Hayden Panettiere: bouncy blonde curls, a room-brightening smile, and impeccable charisma with real heft behind the sweetheart image.

She landed the perfect role for that blend of fizz and fire with “Heroes,” NBC’s sci-fi drama that proved the power of the superhero genre on the small screen well before Marvel Studios was a glint in Kevin Feige’s eye. As Claire Bennet, Panettiere was the breakout star, the cheerleader with regenerative powers who busted the chipper blonde stereotype and revealed the darkness within. Claire wasn’t just the core of the show — ”Save the cheerleader, save the world” — but the embodiment of its Bush-era turmoil. She was the “perfect” all-American girl whose body was unbreakable but who remained an object of unending fascination in the face of pure annihilation.

Panettiere was able to tread the fine line between trope and subversion, between a retro damsel and the thoroughly modern heroine of the 2000s. Claire and Panettiere were so popular that the show abandoned its original plans to refresh the superheroes with each season.

Often, it was her performance doing the lion’s share of the heavy lifting. “Heroes” had a notoriously steep drop-off after its first season, leaving talented actors adrift as the writers struggled to pay off their ambitious setup. By the time the show limped to its conclusion, Claire had lost much of her spark. She became the cliche she was meant to be dismantling. It didn’t help that Panettiere, who was still an adolescent when she won the role, was frequently objectified, both in-text and by audiences. Reading some old writeups of “Heroes” from the mid-2000s is to be confronted by some truly ghoulish misogyny.

Like many a rising young starlet trying to smash through the limitations put upon her, Panettiere was often stuck in less than satisfying roles, such as the truly dismal rom-com “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” which felt two decades out of date upon release in 2009. She found steadier ground as a horror star in the “Scream” franchise, ushering in a new generation of survivors/victims for Ghostface. Back on TV, though, she found arguably her greatest role as Juliette Barnes, a rising country star, in “Nashville.” The ABC musical drama let her play a real adult woman, one who could be bitter, scheming, brittle and a fill-in diva. Juliette was the Eve Harrington in a Stetson, the bitchy backstabber who nonetheless revealed true vulnerabilities amid her scathing quips. As the show progressed, Panettiere managed to keep Juliette grounded and human, which was no easy task as “Nashville” swung wildly into the kind of soapy plotting she navigated as a child. In terms of unforgivable Emmy snubs of the 2010s, her lack of nomination throughout the show’s run is pretty unforgivable.

Panettiere disappeared for a while, after her struggles with postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter left her in what she described as a “living nightmare.” With her memoir, she delved into the full extent of her illness, as well as her experiences with addiction and an abusive relationship. In “This is Me,” she got the chance to speak up and put her own voice front and center after a lifetime of intense media scrutiny. She revealed the ways that a life in front of the cameras and in casting offices impacted her, how being a sex object at 17 hurt her, and a complicated family dynamic irrevocably changed by her status as a celebrity and breadwinner.

What garnered the most headlines from the book’s release were the tidbits about the ceaseless barrage of Hollywood misogyny that chased Panettiere her entire life: the NBC executive who kissed her on the lips at a network party; the “Oscar-winning actor and director” who flashed her when she was 19; the actress she considered a friend who took her on vacation then pushed her into a cabin on a yacht to have sex with “a famous 30-something British singer-songwriter” who was lying naked in bed. She talked about losing a major brand deal because she spoke up about her PPD, and of being plied with “happy pills” by her team so that she could get through a slew of interviews.

Many cautionary tales will be written about Hayden Panettiere, calling her “troubled” and placing her in the canon of child actors who died too young. These are the narratives that the entertainment industry prefers. But do not ignore her talent or resilience, and do not overlook how she reclaimed her voice in her final months of life. Her story was always more than that of the cheerleader.