Following Connie Britton’s heartfelt tribute to Hayden Panettiere, who died Sunday at the age of 36, fellow Nashville alum Charles Esten also remembered his former co-star.

Esten was a late cast addition to the Nashville pilot and the last series regular to be announced in March 2012 on the country music drama about fading Nashville superstar Rayna James (Britton) who is forced to team up with teen sensation Juliette Barnes (Panettiere).

In his Instagram post Monday next to a gallery of photos with Panettiere from the show, Esten recounted his first audition for the role of guitarist and songwriter Deacon Claybourne in a soundstage office in Hollywood.

“I had read two Deacon scenes before pulling out my guitar and singing two songs. I said my goodbyes and, hoping I’d done well, went to open the door to leave. Instead of swinging all the way out, the door bumped into somebody. Kinda hard,” he wrote. “To my complete surprise, It was Hayden Panettiere, who – in full Juliette Barnes mode – had been listening with her ear to the door. Instead of looking even a little bit caught, her face instantly bloomed into the most beautiful smile. Eyes twinkling, she clapped her hands and said, ‘That was so good!!’ I can promise you that in that moment, there was nothing in the world I needed to hear more than that.”

That was the first time Esten met Panettiere who also was auditioning.

“It was her turn to go in, so as I went to leave, I said a jokingly cocky, “See you on the set!’,” he recalled.

Panettiere landed the role of Juliette weeks before Esten was cast after many rounds of testing.

When he showed up in Nashville, where the series was filmed, to start work, Panettiere “walked right up to me, pointed in my face, and with that magical grin said, ‘See you on the set!’,” Esten wrote. “From there, we became fast friends, working very hard to play those 2 troubled Nashvillians, but always having fun and laughing a whole lot along the way.”

As they butted heads at the start of Nashville, Rayna and Juliette also fought over Deacon. Rayna’s longtime guitarist, who had always been in love with her, accepted Juliette’s offer to co-write songs together and later joined her on tour. (In an unfortunate plot development, the two also hooked up in the third episode, something Nashville fans prefer to forget.)

“She was, of course, extraordinarily talented, infusing her larger-than-life character with all the heart, charisma, humor, whip-smart intelligence, and flat-out magic that were, alongside whatever troubles and pain she carried, a part of her own personal palette,” Esten wrote about Panettiere. “What a great gift it was to act with her, sing with her, and to just be her friend.”

On the show, both Deacon and Juliette struggled with alcoholism, something Panettiere had said hit too hold to home for her as it mirrored her real-life addition problems.

Esten also recalled Panettiere being “extremely kind” to his wife Patty.

“Together, we are heartbroken that she is gone, and praying for her family, and for all those who, like us, will miss and mourn her so dearly,” he wrote. “God bless you, Hayden. Rest In Peace and Light ❤️”

Earlier on Monday, Britton posted her own remembrance on IG, which also featured a series of photos from the set of Nashville.

“I have no words for this sad song. Just heartbreak,” she wrote. “I love you girl. Sleep easy now. 💔”

Among the performances for which Hayden Panettiere has been most fondly remembered in light of her death at age 36 are her memorable turns in the Scream franchise.

Panettiere, who died Sunday, got her start as a child actress in projects like Remember the Titans before starring on such series as Heroes and Nashville and in features like Ice Princess and I Love You, Beth Cooper. In 2011, she originated the role of Kirby Reed in Scream 4 before reprising the character for 2023’s Scream VI after fans campaigned for her return.

“The world is losing a very talented actress and beautiful soul who has shared and been revealing about her struggles along the way,” Nancy Naylor, who worked as a casting director for Scream 4, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “One hopes that there’s a happy ending, but it doesn’t always turn out that way in real life.”

Scream 4 marked not only Panettiere’s introduction to the beloved slasher series that filmmaker Wes Craven initiated with 1996’s original movie, but it also served as Naylor’s first and only project in the franchise. She worked with fellow casting directors Avy Kaufman and Rick Rosenthal on the sequel that saw the return of franchise mainstays Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, along with the additions of series newcomers Emma Roberts, Mary McDonnell, Anthony Anderson and Alison Brie.

“Hayden had been known from Heroes and had been working as a child actress, and the industry was aware of her,” Naylor recalls. “When her name came up, she seemed like a really terrific contender for the role of Kirby and a great contrast to Emma Roberts. They were just visually and energetically very different, and we thought they would be great together.”

In Scream 4, Kirby (Panettiere) is a horror-obsessed Woodsboro high school student and the best friend to Jill, who is played by Roberts and is the cousin of Campbell’s character, Sidney. Naylor recalls Panettiere’s positive energy when she landed the part: “I remember thinking she felt very happy. She was very excited to be in the mix and to get the role.”

While reflecting on what made her stand out in the audition process, the casting director says, “It was her fierce warrior nature for the role. The character has this incredible scene where she’s on a phone call with Ghostface, and she has to save her friend and [rattle] off a giant list of genre films in a desperate hour. I knew that she would have the passion and the energy to make that scene so believable, so heartbreaking, so intense — and she absolutely delivered all of those qualities.”

As Mariska Hargitay reflects on the past year in her life – a momentous one for the actress and filmmaker – a word comes to her mind to describe it: “cathartic.”

She completed her 27^th season starring as Capt. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU and in May made her Broadway debut in the drama Every Brilliant Thing – both exceptional achievements. But the catharsis emerged through an even more personal endeavor: her nonfiction directorial debut My Mom Jayne. The HBO documentary, an intimate exploration of Hargitay’s mother, the late actress Jayne Mansfield, and of a mystery surrounding the identity of Hargitay’s father, has earned three Primetime Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Nonfiction Program.

“The film has been, for me, the gift that just keeps on giving,” she tells Deadline. “It was an archeological dig of me not knowing what I was going to find, hoping that I had the internal architecture to support myself… Going into the unknown and not knowing what the other side was going to look like, it’s been so extraordinary to come out the other side with the results beyond my even dreams or comprehension, not knowing that the film would resonate with so many people the way it has.”

Hargitay was just three years old when her mother was tragically killed in an auto accident outside New Orleans in 1967. Mariska and her two older brothers, Zoltán and Miklos (Mickey Jr.), were in the back seat of the vehicle but survived. Mariska and her older siblings were raised by Mickey Hargitay Sr., the man she grew up believing to be her biological father.

Jayne Mansfield possessed great beauty and talent. She was multilingual and played classical piano and violin, but her exceptional good looks and curvaceous figure limited how the men who ran Hollywood perceived her. Mansfield accommodated herself to the sex symbol persona. In the film, Hargitay recalls growing up without her mom and becoming uncomfortable with how Mansfield had presented on screen.

“I didn’t really appreciate the sort of bombshell image and didn’t like some of the [acting] choices she made,” Hargitay told us at the Cannes Film Festival, where My Mom Jayne premiered. “I felt myself being embarrassed by her and just wanting a normal mom and a regular mom and ‘pick me up from school’ and like that… I just felt like I dissociated myself and said, yeah, I don’t want to be part of that, and I want to do it differently.”

In the course of the film, Hargitay reevaluates her mom, forming a fuller picture of how Mansfield’s career choices were circumscribed by the egregious sexism of the 1950s and ‘60s. She also explores her mother’s complicated love life, and the blended family Jayne raised that included Mickey Hargitay’s daughter by his first wife. The honesty of the portrayal, coupled with the reality that many people experience blended families or complicated family dynamics has allowed viewers to connect with the film.

“You could say, ‘Oh, [this story is] about Jayne Mansfield, a movie star in the ’50s and her TV star daughter’; that’s not what the movie is about. It’s a family film. It’s a story about generational trauma, and it’s a story about identity and recovery and reclamation and forgiveness and so many things,” Hargitay says, expressing pride in “the way the film has been received and the way that people have said, ‘That’s my story,’ and the spark that has led people to investigate their own families to uncover their family secrets or just deal with them or just look at them closer.”

Hargitay captures on screen her reaction to learning as an adult that Mickey Hargitay in fact wasn’t her biological father. Her dad was Nelson Sardelli, a Brazilian singer with whom Jayne Mansfield became romantically involved during a break from her marriage to Hargitay. That revelation triggered conflicting emotions in Mariska, who felt intensely loyal to Mickey Hargitay as her loving father and didn’t want it to seem as if, somehow, she were turning her back on him.

“When we keep secrets, I think that occupies a big part of our psyche — knowingly and unconsciously,” Hargitay observes. “Holding this secret and feeling bad about it and knowing that there was a part of me that just wasn’t clear and allowing myself to be my authentic self — but out of duty thinking this is how it had to be to honor my father. And then when I came to the realization like, no, no, no, that secret isn’t honoring anyone. We have to tell the secret.”

She adds, “I wanted to make a love letter for my father, Mickey. That’s what I wanted to do. But in the process, it turned out to really be a love letter to all three of them [Jayne, Nelson, and Mickey] because the film deals with the complexity of the human condition, the real complexities of what it is to be human and how two things can be true at once.”

In My Mom Jayne, Mariska connects with Nelson Sardelli, and the half-sisters she never knew she had.

“It was very cathartic and mind-blowing to hear Nelson’s side of the story and understanding why he made the decisions that he made and how complex the decisions were for all three of them in so many ways,” she shares. “I was freed up; I felt like this giant exhale.”

The freeing of psychic space has allowed Hargitay to pursue new avenues of creativity. She made her Broadway debut 40 years after her late mother had done the same.

“She was 22 [when she made her debut] and I was 62. That was also a deeply extraordinary feeling for me,” Hargitay affirms. “And when I went to Broadway, one of the things that I took with me was a plaque that she got that said ‘Broadway’s Rising Star 1955.’ And so every night I would hold that before I went [on stage].”

Hargitay will continue an extraordinary year by embarking on the 28^th season of Law & Order: SVU and taking on another major challenge – hosting the Primetime Emmy Awards on NBC on Monday, Sept. 14.

We’ll have more on Mariska’s plans for hosting the show in a separate piece we’ll publish on Tuesday. She won’t be simultaneously hosting and hearing announcements of winners in the documentary categories – those are presented at the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony in Los Angeles on Sept. 5 and 6.