In the wake of Hayden Panettiere’s death, the director of one of her last films is opening up about his experience with her on set, saying the “energy in her room was pretty dark” at the time.

The actress, who worked with Griff Furst on his 2025 film A Breed Apart, died on Sunday at age 36 at an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina.

“I had met Hayden about 10 years before that and I knew that she was insanely talented, so when she signed on to do this picture that we were shooting, I was psyched,” Furst began in a video recently posted on Instagram. “I really wanted to work with her.”

He then recalled realizing “something was off” with Panettiere while filming, making a point to mention the actress’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Brian Hickerson’s presence when he would visit the A Breed Apart set.

“So I’m on set, and I get word from the movie’s security team who picked her up from the airport that something was off,” Furst continued. “I didn’t think much about it, and so I left set and I walked over to greet her and her boyfriend Brian. He opened the door. Hayden was incredibly sweet and gracious and excited to work, but she was not OK.”

“I’m not going to get into the details of why that was, but having worked on over 100 movies and seeing just about everything, it was pretty clear that she wasn’t okay and the energy in her room was pretty dark,” the director added.

Amid the investigation into Panettiere’s death, a police report said Hickerson and his brother were at the scene when the actress was pronounced dead by authorities. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office said that her cause and manner of death remain pending further investigation, and that there were no obvious signs of trauma. However, officials were reportedly heard discussing an “overdose” and “cardiac arrest” on the 911 call at the time of her death.

Panettiere had been open about her struggles with alcohol and opioid addiction, further detailing her experiences in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, released earlier this year. In the book, she also detailed physical abuse by Hickerson.

The actress’ mother, Lesley Vogel, also recently broke her silence on her daughter’s death, criticizing Hickerson, saying, “This person in her life that we have been trying to get rid of for quite some time was with her at her death and that was Brian Hickerson.”

In Furst’s Instagram video, the director added that he “believed she was getting better” and that he and Panettiere “talked about doing another picture together recently, which is what makes this shitty news hit even harder.”

ABC has been pushing back on FCC for several months now, but on Tuesday, it filed a First Amendment lawsuit, claiming that the agency’s regulatory actions and investigations were part of a Trump administration effort to punish it for its speech.

The lawsuit goes through a narrative of Donald Trump‘s attacks on the network, including his calls for the revocation of FCC licenses. In fact, the third paragraph of the ABC complaint features a screenshot of a Trump Truth Social post in which he calls for licenses to be terminated because of “100% negative” coverage on newscasts and late-night shows.

The central part of the lawsuit is the FCC’s order that ABC’s eight owned broadcast stations file for early license renewal, a very unusual regulatory demand, given that the first of the licenses wasn’t set to expire until 2028. While the FCC tied its order to an ongoing investigation of the network’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices, ABC lawyers noted that it came just after Trump blasted Jimmy Kimmel over jokes on his show.

The FCC issued a statement on the ABC lawsuit. with a spokesperson saying, “All broadcasters have a legal obligation to operate in the public interest—even Disney.  The FCC has been examining claims that Disney engaged in illegal DEI discrimination for over a year.  Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC’s proceeding, as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation as well as their decision to ask a court to stop the FCC from further pursuing matters.”

ABC, however, contended that the consequences of the Trump administration’s actions go beyond ABC. The network stated in the lawsuit, “If the Administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable: tell only the stories the Administration deems favorable, or face the coercive machinery of the federal government. In such a world, the press could in no way be described as free.”

Here are five of the standout claims that ABC made in its lawsuit to try to bolster its point:

FCC “confirmed the connection” to Trump’s threats: A challenge to ABC’s First Amendment claim will be in proving that there is a causal link to the president’s remarks and FCC action.

Among other things, the network noted the timing of the FCC’s order for early license renewals, coming a day after Trump called on ABC to fire Kimmel over a comment he made about First Lady Melania Trump.

But the network also cited a more recent example they claimed “confirmed the connection” between the White House and the FCC. In July, Trump gave a primetime address, but ABC and NBC decided not to broadcast it, amid concerns that the president would use the platform to make unfounded claims about election rigging.

The network’s legal team wrote, “ABC was aware that the President wanted the address to be broadcast live, and considered the risk of resulting Administration retaliation. ABC ultimately decided to livestream the speech on ABC News Live, which it ordinarily would not have done.”

Trump was aware of the decisions to bypass the address, and during the speech called for ABC and NBC to lose their licenses. ABC noted in the lawsuit that after the Trump threat, the FCC “promptly confirmed the connection: following the President’s demand, the Chairman stated that the Commission would consider ABC’s decision not to broadcast the July 16 address as part of its review of the Stations’ renewal applications.”

Returning Kimmel to the air invited “further reprisal from the administration”: Few incidents involving the FCC drew the level of attention than what happened last September, when ABC put Kimmel on suspension amid furor among one of his jokes about the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

As noted in the ABC lawsuit, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr warned the network’s stations that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” he said on Benny Johnson’s podcast.

Hours later, ABC suspended Kimmel. In the lawsuit, its legal team said that the network was exercising its editorial judgment in suspending the late-night host, but they also noted that the president “celebrated” the decision, writing on Truth Social, “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” The lawsuit also noted Carr’s comment to a reporter about the Kimmel suspension: an animated image of two characters from The Office celebrating.

Then, the network’s legal team wrote, ABC made the decision to return Mr. Kimmel to the air “with full awareness that doing so was likely to invite further reprisal from the Administration.”

They added, “The reprisal was swift to manifest: the following day, the President posted on Truth Social: ‘I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. . . . I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.’”

Carr later insisted that his comments were not a threat. “What I’ve been clear about is that if you look at the full context, not only what I said, but what the companies themselves have said about their decision. It was a business decision,” he told reporters after the incident.

Brendan Carr takes Trump’s social media posts “as his directives”: While the lawsuit runs through a gallery of Trump’s attacks on ABC and other networks, it also cites numerous comments made by the FCC chairman.

The ABC lawsuit cites this as further evidence that Carr is taking cues from Trump. The network claimed that Carr “takes the president’s social media posts as his directives.”

The network’s legal team wrote, “First, replying to a post by the President expressing frustration at news coverage of the Iran conflict, the Chairman warned that stations airing ‘fake news’ had ‘a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,’ explaining that ‘they will lose their licenses if they do not.’”

“Similarly, when the President called for NBC to fire late-night television host Seth Meyers, the Chairman reposted the President’s post to his official X account, thereby throwing the weight of NBC’s chief regulator in support of the President’s attempt to influence NBC’s editorial discretion.”

Carr has defended his comments, often citing the obligation of broadcasters to uphold a public interest standard. But Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat on the commission, has said that the FCC has been using an “undefined” concept as a “roving mandate to police speech.”

The FCC demanded records of political donations from The View hosts and ABC News personnel. According to the lawsuit, as part of the FCC’s investigation into The View, the agency’s Media Bureau made an extensive list of demands last month for information from the network’s Houston station. The investigation is into whether The View much comply with the FCC’s equal time rule, which requires that broadcasters who feature political candidates as guests must offer comparable time to rivals, if requested.

Per the lawsuit, the FCC issued a letter of inquiry last month directing the station to “produce all internal communications among The View’s booking staff, its segment producers, its Executive Producer, and its on-air co-hosts discussing any candidate over a two-year period, together with the messages that two named co- hosts had sent to the program’s Executive Producer about a single booking decision.” The FCC also demanded the disclosure of political donations of employees and co-hosts, including a list of every donation over the past four years and the date of each, according to the suit.

According to ABC, the Media Bureau issued another inquiry two weeks later that “demanded the standards and policies in place across all ABC programs relating to ‘journalistic integrity, newsworthiness, fairness, impartiality, objectivity, partisanship, [and] bias,’ as well as the political donations of on-air talent and producers, naming Good Morning America, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and ABC World News Tonight with David Muir.”

The network’s legal team argued that that Communications Act’s equal time provisions do not include a provision that “permits the government to demand a journalist’s or on-air anchor’s messages to her producer, to inventory her political contributions, or to audit the editorial standards of an entire news division.”

The targeting of The View already has forced the show to avoid political candidate guests. ABC is asking for immediate action from the court, including a temporary restraining order to prohibit the FCC from taking any further moves in its early license renewal proceedings.

The network’s legal team emphasized the urgency of the situation by citing instances where editorial decisions are being impacted. They noted that The View has not booked a political candidate since February, when U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico’s appearance triggered the agency’s investigation. The show also has passed on clips to air during the Hot Topics segment on The View and the cold open of the program, out of concern of triggering the equal time requirement, per the lawsuit.

Carr has denied that he is censoring the program, and merely enforcing a rule on the books that doesn’t prevent the show from featuring candidates, albeit they would be on the hook to offer equal time. ABC, however, argued that The View falls under an exemption for bonafide news programming, and that the FCC affirmed as much in 2002.

The network’s legal team argued, “Since the Bureau’s inquiry began, Plaintiffs must now evaluate any invitation to a political candidate for its potential consequences, including whether it might later be cited by the Commission as a basis for non-renewal in the Stations’ impending license renewal process.”

In mid-July 2025, Yvonne De Mare got an irresistible job offer. She’d been working with Stephen Colbert for two decades, starting as an assistant director on “The Colbert Report” and following the comedian and host when he took over CBS’s “Late Show” franchise in 2015. For almost all of that time, Jim Hoskinson had directed Colbert’s shows, earning 14 Emmy nominations along the way. But Hoskinson had decided to retire, and De Mare was offered the director’s chair.

“It completely blew my mind,” said De Mare, who’d been planning to have a long-delayed knee surgery that summer. “I said, ‘Well, there goes the idea of getting my knee done in August.’”

A pause. “And then, three days after I got the director’s job, we got the news that the show was canceled.” She laughed. “I was like, ‘Well, OK. I got the job and the show’s going away, but I’ll have some time on the other end to get the knee taken care of.’

But first, 10 more months on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” “There was a lot infused in that 10 months,” said De Mare, who has also worked on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “The Daily Show” and “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.” “But the craziness really kicked in in the last eight weeks, when we were doing lots of pre-tapes and all these different celebrities wanted to get on to get their last moments with Stephen.”

For those last weeks, De Mare watched the stagehands sometimes work from 6:00 a.m. until midnight to build sets for one night’s sketch and immediately break them down to make something else to pre-tape the next morning. “It was a nonstop hamster wheel of stuff,” she said.

The final “Late Show” taping happened on May 21, with Paul McCartney as the last guest and Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds, Jon Stewart, Elijah Wood, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste and fellow hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver among those who made special appearances. Some appeared live, others in pre-taped segments that made use of special effects and weren’t completely finished until minutes before airtime. The atmosphere, De Mare said, was so chaotic that the import of what they were doing barely registered.

“It was such an intense day with all the different things going on,” she said. “Because of everything leading up to that day, I think nobody looked at it as the last show. We had been so focused on getting to that point that it became a race-to-the-finish kind of thing. We all just hunkered down trying to get through that day.”

For the final taping, the show added an extra camera operator to their normal group of five, plus a couple of robotic cameras positioned around the Ed Sullivan Theater. “We tried to cover all our bases,” she said.

In a way, though, the complexity of the finale helped the team in the control room. The opening stretch of the episode was a barrage of special guests, with constant interruptions from luminaries in the audience. But a running gag about technical difficulties in the theater segued into a lengthy sci-fi segment in which a glowing green portal materialized, summoned into existence by the logical impossibility of the top-rated late-night show being canceled.

“Jake Plunkett directed the portal stuff, which he had been working on for months,” De Mare said. “It was an insane amount of work, and even during rehearsal, we didn’t have the final version. But when we actually went into taping, that was easy, because once we got through the first half of the show with all the different celebs, then we got to the part that Jake did. For me, it was just ‘roll the tape.’

“I got to kind of, you know, sit back and take a breath, and then it was really doing the music, the live Paul McCartney song on the other end of it. And then getting the entirety of the crew and staff on stage to celebrate them.”

Make that almost the entirety of the crew and staff. As McCartney sang “Hello Goodbye,” the “Late Show” crew emerged from backstage and streamed onto the stage or onto catwalks behind and above the band—except for De Mare and her team, who were stuck in the control room running the show. Unable to join their co-workers, they posed for a shot where they were all waving to the camera. And then De Mare got preoccupied before with maximizing the number of crew members who could be seen in the final on-stage shot before she cut to a final backstage bit with Colbert and McCartney.

“I was so focused on trying to make sure that we ended with that shot that I edited over everybody in the control room was waving,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “I completely blew out the control room and I felt terrible for everybody that worked so hard. But they understood.”

Only when it was all over did she feel the impact of what they’d just done. “It took me a minute,” she said. “For 10 months, it was just nonstop craziness. When we finally faded to black, it was sort of like, ‘Oh my goodness. It’s really fade to black this time. Wow.’

“It took a second, and then my technical director, Karen, and I looked at each other and hugged, and then tears started. We all started hugging in the control room, and it was really a beautiful moment.”

By the way, De Mare told these stories from her home, where she was sitting sideways in front of her computer with her leg propped up, a few days after finally having that knee operation. “Basically,” she said, “the only thing I’ve been focused on at this point is trying to get back on my feet.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.