Hayden Panettiere Reflects on Entering Rehab While Starring in Nashville: 'I Just Wanted to Escape'

On ABC’s Nashville, Juliette Barnes’ struggles mirrored star Hayden Panettiere‘s a little too closely, the actress says in a new interview.

“When I was on Nashville, they really wrote my life into it. So on the show, one of the storylines was that I was playing an alcoholic. Another storyline was that I was pregnant on the show, and then I got postpartum depression,” Panettiere says during her appearance on the newest episode of Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk. “I had to go to work every day and be acting out what I was truly going through. So by the time I got home, I didn’t want to sit there with my own feelings and work them out. You know, I just wanted to escape.”

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In a sit-down chat with Jada Pinkett Smith, Adrienne Banfield Norris and guest host Kelly Osbourne, Panettiere recalls going to treatment roughly four months after Kaya, her daughter with Wladimir Klitschko, was born in December 2014. The Golden Globe-nominated actress says that she was drinking heavily at the time, “just leaning on that crutch, and it was making things worse.” She adds that she was diagnosed with postpartum depression at the facility where she sought help.

Per Panettiere, her first visit lasted roughly a month; a subsequent one lasted longer. After the country-music drama ended in 2018, she says during the interview, her mental health issues got worse, and she checked into a facility where she wound up staying for eight months.

“I had had it with myself, and I knew it was a longer process,” she says.

Nashville viewers will remember that in October 2015, Panettiere took a very public step back from the show, then in its fourth season. She returned to set the following January but then resumed treatment shortly after the season’s production wrapped.

She appeared in the show’s final two seasons, though Juliette’s involvement in a cult created a reason for Panettiere to be off-screen for a bunch of episodes.

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