COUNTRY STRONG
A little trip to Nashville was all it took to land Hayden Panettiere at the top of the Hollywood heap.
The actor Eric Stoltz is skulking around the 25th floor of the Sheraton Downtown Hotel in Nashville. Swimming in his suit, he runs his fingers through his shoulder-length red hair. “OK, Miss Pan-uh-tee-air-ay,” he drawls, pronouncing Hayden’s last name with a goofy Italian accent. “Let’s do your marks.”
Stoltz is on hand to direct an episode of Nashville, ABC’s breakout hit of 2012 that pits, soap-style, country music’s bratty pop tart Juliette Barnes (Panettiere) against an older rival, the acclaimed and adored Rayna Jaymes (Connie Britton). It’s the kind of show you’d be embarrassed to like if it weren’t so well conceived and expertly executed. Even Lena Dunham has been sucked in by its unique appeal—via Twitter, she anointed Juliette as “girlstuff I love.” No wonder an average of 9 million viewers are tuning in every Wednesday night and then downloading singles from the soundtrack album on iTunes—1.3 million times, by last count.
On this 25-degree day in January, Panettiere and Charles Esten, who plays Deacon, Juliette’s mentor, will spend all afternoon in a stifling hotel room perfecting a 60-second conversation. But first, Panettiere must choreograph pouring a can of energy drink. “This is so…pink!” she exclaims, as 20-plus crew members in ABC-issued Nashville fleeces chuckle perfunctorily. Just the sight of this mega-maintenance production is exhausting, but after two takes, the scene is wrapped and the crowd disperses. “That was surprisingly good,” murmurs Stoltz before releasing his 23-year-old lead. She wriggles a black puffy coat over her
costume—dark denim jeans, an embroidered blouse, and tooled leather boots—and leads me to an adjacent suite, where she nibbles on a flattened pastry.
Even though 16-hour days are de rigeur, Panettiere spends some of that time waiting for things to happen. “It’s like gold,” she says, cradling a freshly delivered script, which she’ll pore over when she’s not messing around with the crew or fielding emails from her management team back in L.A. And this, Nashville fans, is pretty much the July-through-April drill. Her downtime, when it exists, lacks the Hollywood trappings that consume many of her peers, and that suits Panettiere just fine. “I wanted a change,” she says with a shrug, world-wearier than her years should allow. “I wanted to get out of L.A.”
The abrupt relocation of her entire life to Nashville was a gamble, considering that Panettiere had only visited the city once before. But here, she’s both relieved and inspired, as evidenced during our (geriatrically) early dinner at a red-sauce Italian restaurant across the street from her modern but generic apartment complex. Barefaced and wearing a plain long-sleeved tee and dark-denim skinnies, she is not exactly dressed to impress. “I’m willing to be fashion-forward,” she says when I compliment the straightforward Cavalli gown she wore to the Golden Globes. “But not so much that I feel like I’m playing a character.”
At the restaurant, Panettiere is a known quantity. “So sorry, we are out of the Bolognese,” jokes our waiter, while filling our water glasses. She’s mock indignant, and soon enough, her usual arrives. “I love that you can just have a drink here and nobody bothers you,” she says. “The bartenders and waiters become your protection, your family. If anybody ever hassles you, they’re right there to back you up.”
Not that Panettiere, who grew up just outside of New York City, needs much of that. Her acting career began when she was 11 months old, the handiwork of her mother and retired momager Lesley Vogel, a former soap opera actress. (She’ll be familiar to regular readers of Perez Hilton, who compared her to Dina Lohan back when he was mean.) Panettiere’s first employers were Playskool, Wendy’s, and Nix Lice Shampoo, but, by age four, she graduated to One Life to Live and then Guiding Light.
Panettiere’s star-making moment happened in 2006, when she was cast as the magical cheerleader on NBC’s hit series Heroes. At age 16, she decamped to Los Angeles, where her teenage years were almost entirely consumed by the binary pursuits of work and homework. “It was crazy,” she says of the schedule, although she has nothing but fond memories of the show that landed her the cover of Entertainment Weekly, pom-poms in hand, as the first person on a list of “100 Stars We Love Right Now.”
When Heroes ended in 2010, Panettiere was 20, and if she wanted to continue working, she had to prove she could handle more mature roles. But that didn’t quite pan out. She ended up playing a one-note cheerleader in I Love You, Beth Cooper and a shrill teenybopper in Scream 4. “Was I typecast? Absolutely,” she admits. “I knew it was going to be an uphill battle, so I laid low and did silly things, like dyeing my hair Little Mermaid-red.” To her credit, she did stop short of manic head-shaving and fine jewelry theft. “I was afraid of my parents,” she explains. “I had that healthy fear of disappointing them.”
She stirs her minestrone soup. “I’ve definitely made mistakes,” she insists. “I was smack in the middle of that generation whose constant scandals were on the cover of all those magazines. Everyone was looking to me to fall off my horse—to make a mistake, just one wrong step. So I went out of my way to make sure that I didn’t even put myself in a position to be seen that way.”
But Panettiere’s path to adulthood wasn’t seamless—it was just internalized. “Making the transition from being a child actor to an adult was tough,” she admits. “When I was a kid, it was just instincts, instincts, instincts. It never crossed my mind that acting wouldn’t work out. But when I’d grown up enough to start questioning myself, I started worrying and doubting.”
Still? Surely the role of Juliette Barnes will instill some confidence, especially after beating out 30 or 40 other actresses with singing chops for the role. Panettiere auditioned for executive producer R.J. Cutler and creator Callie Khouri, the seasoned screenwriter of Thelma & Louise, who had never even seen Heroes. “She had the part the day she walked in,” says Khouri over the phone from Nashville. “She just said it was hers, you know? It was an undeniable thing.”
Britton, Panettiere’s co-star, agrees. “We ran into each other at a party back in L.A. when they were just casting,” she recalls. “She was saying how she really wanted to do it, and I was so excited, because I knew that she was going to want to give [Juliette] a lot more dimension.”
Growing up, the music of Alison Krauss & Union Station and Shania Twain were “a huge thing in my house,” says Panettiere. An aspiring singer since childhood, the New Yorker had always wanted to try her hand as a country artist, but she knew she’d be judged as a fake. Instead, as a teenager, she recorded a pop album that was never released. “It just wasn’t the kind of music I wanted to do,” she reasons. “I was trying to become another artist who already existed. At the 13th hour, I just said, ‘I’m sorry, guys, but I can’t put out something that I’m not proud of.’ But I always said that if I was going to sing again, that it would be country music.”
Among the cast and crew, Khouri says, Panettiere is viewed as a gift. “Sometimes, when I’m sitting in the editing room, watching one incredibly nuanced performance after another, I have to call Hayden and say, ‘You’re blowing my mind,’” says Khouri. “A lot of people could play Juliette as a cardboard cutout or stereotype, but she has made her such an intense human being. Every action, no matter how good or bad, is emotionally justified to the core.”
In the first few episodes, Juliette is the kind of girl you love to hate—she’s all id, and unafraid to show it. But contrary to instinct, you find yourself rooting for the snotty little upstart. Surprisingly, despite Panettiere’s rock-solid musicial performances, she admits to suffering from extreme stage fright. “I still have major doubts,” she says. “My voice takes some work—it’s not immediately pitch-perfect.”
Her audience is none the wiser. “She’s hilarious,” says Britton. “We are always doing these concert performances together in front of audiences with all these extras, and she’s constantly battling her hemline. She’s always going out in front of everybody and apologizing for any unintended crotch shots.”
When it came time to conceptualize the off-stage Juliette, who unravels when her chaotic personal life crashes into her micromanaged professional one, Panettiere was willing to mine from her own experiences. “I know what it feels like to be under that kind of pressure and have personal issues be a constant topic of conversation,” she says. “A lot of Juliette’s lashing out is based on her childhood and the damage done there, and I think most people can find some sort of pain in their lives.” Khouri admits she’s not privy to Panettiere’s personal sistuation, but that “she’s obviously drawing on something, because it’s just amazing, the work that she’s doing.”
Given all that’s happened since Nashville’s debut last fall, Panettiere’s old confidence issues seem so dated, but when asked about her dreams for the future, she refrains from revealing the full scope of her ambition. “I just want to do everything,” she says earnestly.
Khouri has one suggestion: What about directing? “Everybody is really awed by her technical expertise as well as her acting,” she says. “She knows where the camera is, she knows what the moves should be, and she knows how to get the business done. She’s got a great eye, even when the eye is on her. And I’m sure if there’s a story she wants to tell, she can do whatever she wants. She’s got it all.”
Panettiere’s strength lies in no small part with the woman she identifies as the Deacon-like character in her life, her best friend and makeup artist Amy Oresman. “She’s been around me since I was 15, and she’s like my big sister,” she says. “She’s a Leo, too, and she’s tough enough to take me on. She was always there for me, but she’s definitely not afraid to tell me what’s up.”
Clearly relishing the turns her life has taken, Panettiere unwinds by “stuffing [her] face and drinking wine” with a group of singer-songwriter friends. Although she’s dying to get a dog, she makes do with a low-maintenance corn snake named Louis. As she forks her way through a heaping plate of pasta, she takes out her iPhone and shows me photos of herself covered in furrry little creatures at an animal park in Miami. “Can you believe these are all lemurs?” she smiles, unafraid to be a little bit dorky.
She claims to be both a girl’s girl and a guy’s girl, but she’s certainly very popular with the boys, most recently former New York Jets wide receiver Scotty McKnight, whom she dated until December. “How long till this comes out?” she asks sheepishly when questioned about her love life. (A few days after our interview, she is spotted with ex-boyfriend Wladimir Klitschko, a professional heavyweight boxer, whom she dated from 2009 to 2011.) “It’s almost like signing a contract,” she says of courtship. “There’s no such thing as a casual date in this business. But then when you go through a breakup, it’s like a divorce. You have to put it out there eventually, because if you’re ever seen with another guy, even if he’s just a friend, you’re immediately cheating.”
No wonder she didn’t bring a date to the Golden Globes, where her performance in Nashville earned a nomination in the Best Supporting Actress category. “I was told to be available for a call at 7:20 a.m.,” she recalls of the morning the nominations were announced. “I was in bed, and I put my phone on my chest and went back to sleep, because they were never going to call. Then it started vibrating, and when I picked it up, all I could hear were screams. I cried, and then I made a grilled cheese. I didn’t know what else to do.” She shrugs.
Panettiere ultimately watched 78-year-old Downton Abbey star Maggie Smith accept the award, but for the first time in the many years that she’s attended the Globes, she found herself at ease. “I didn’t feel like I was crashing somebody else’s party,” she says, salting the last bite of her pasta. “It’s such an amazing group of people with such cachet. Even though I’ve been doing this forever, I used to feel like I wasn’t worthy enough to be there. Finally, I took a step through the door of belonging.”