It’s been almost exactly a decade since “Nashville” left ABC. Though the show continued for two more seasons on CMT, its main period of acclaim and attention — between 2012 and 2016 — was guided in large part by Hayden Panettiere. Panettiere’s character, the rising country-pop star Juliette Barnes, became the show’s center of gravity in its first several seasons. But what no one knew at the time was the toll the series was taking on one of its stars.
The filming of “Nashville” is just one of several eye-opening sections of This Is Me: A Reckoning, the upcoming memoir from Panettiere (out May 19 via Hachette) that finds her candidly discussing postpartum depression, addiction, and domestic abuse. In the book, Panettiere details her long and sometimes difficult career in show business; her contentious marriage to Wladimir Klitschko; working as a child actor on A Bug’s Life and Remember the Titans; the ups and downs of filming shows like “Heroes” and “Nashville”; and more.
In the following excerpt, Panettiere writes of the challenges and social isolation she experienced during her time on “Nashville”: “The bigger issue was when I realized my character’s story lines were so similar to what was transpiring in my real life.”
The Nashville set wasn’t what I expected. Far from it.
“I guess I thought we’d all be friends,” I said to [my assistant] Allie one day when we were sitting by the pool at the house I was renting. “You know, cast, crew, directors, all one big happy family. But it’s not like that at all.”
“Well, that’s why you have me,” Allie answered.
When my Nashville castmates and I finished filming at the end of the week, I assumed we’d all decompress over drinks or dinner. This had been my experience when I was on Heroes. Instead, the opposite happened: The entire cast and crew scattered. For example, Connie [Britton] went home to her son, and Charles Esten — who played country musician Deacon Claybourne — drove away to spend the weekend with his wife and three kids. The exception was Jonathan Jackson, who played singer-songwriter Avery Barkley. He lived with his wife, Lisa, and their kids about 20 miles south of Nashville in Franklin — a town that’s home to dozens of country music stars — and they sometimes invited me over for dinner. Not wanting to make the long drive home, I often crashed in their guest room, grateful for a warm bed and the good friends who’d offered it to me.
But other than Jonathan, I wasn’t as close to my co-stars as I would have liked to have been. I couldn’t figure it out. We were all new faces in a strange town, yet we weren’t growing into friends.
“That’s why I’m thankful for you every day,” I said to Allie. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Allie wasn’t tied to the set like me, so she got to explore town and meet people for both of us. In Nashville, a lot of people work in entertainment, but there are plenty of others who don’t, so Allie started to collect a random assortment of friends. There were people from all sorts of professions — all of whom were looking for a good time, and I was right there with them. We had pool parties and nights out drinking and dancing, with an emphasis on the drinking part. Nashville was a drink all night, crash into bed, then take a nip of the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you in the morning kind of place. I was 23, and I could roll with it. I also have the tolerance level of an elephant, so hard partying didn’t hurt me. Alcohol didn’t become my enemy till after [my daughter] Kaya was born.
But when the weekend was over, it was back to the lonely set, where I’d started to feel that the writers’ priorities were just a little bit off.
I remember the first time I saw John Q, a 2002 film starring Denzel Washington, about a man who takes an emergency room hostage when he learns that insurance has denied his young son’s heart transplant.
“Oh, my God,” I said to Mom, who was watching it with me. “He’s crying like it’s his own son dying, in real life. Denzel is about to rip my heart out.”
Mom nodded. “That’s it right there,” she answered. “It’s what I’ve always told you about getting your emotions on the table in a scene. That man is not phoning it in.”
Panettiere with Connie Britton in Nashville
Mark Levine/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images
In my mind, Denzel Washington’s performance in John Q set the bar for male actors mustering up those trigger tears Mom always talked about. Most actresses have no problem breaking down and producing emotions, but it was far less common to see males do it — and frankly, I also think it just wasn’t expected from them. Denzel most certainly delivered and after his John Q performance, an actor couldn’t just fake tears and get away with it. Not everyone can be Denzel, but with a lot of training, I believe that any actor can learn to connect with their emotions and project them into a scene. Mom was right — phoning it in should never be on the table.
To bring emotion to a scene, it helps to have a well written script, like John Q did. A script with lousy dialogue can make an actor’s job incredibly difficult.
When you’re on a show, it’s normal to get re-written scenes right in the middle of filming an episode. I watched as the writers opened their scripts and rewrote them to make certain characters more likable, make scenes flow better, or tweak them to satisfy the audience. Connie’s character, Rayna Jaymes, had an edge. For example, she wasn’t always nice to her husband or father, and sometimes she got a little controlling around her daughters. She also wasn’t the best influence on Deacon, her ex-boyfriend and songwriting partner, and some fans wondered if Rayna was one of the reasons Deacon struggled with his sobriety. In my mind, the fact that she wasn’t perfect and could be kind of a pain in the butt made Rayna human. If you didn’t like her, so be it. She’d been through a lot in life, and she was who she was.
But certain people seemed dead set on making Rayna [more] likable. More than once, I read a script the night before, then discovered the next day that someone had completely rewritten some of the most pivotal scenes my character had with her. All the emotional dialogue that makes a character and the story real had been ex’d out.
Regardless of my frustration about the re-writes, I always figured out how to make it work. The bigger issue was when I realized that my character’s story lines were so similar to what was transpiring in my real life. At first I thought it must have been a coincidence, but it soon became clear that my life was being written into the script.
From the book THIS IS ME: A RECKONING by Hayden Panettiere. Copyright © 2026 by Hayden Panettiere. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.
