Hayden Panettiere shared insight into her four-year hiatus from acting, which started after her final season of Nashville in 2018 and lasted until her return in 2023’s Scream VI.

Hayden Panettiere is reflecting on her time out of the spotlight.

The Scream 4 actor recently detailed her four-year break from acting, including how the sudden decision helped her focus on different aspects of her personal life.

“I had taken four years off. Didn’t know or plan to, but that’s just the way it panned out,” Panettiere, 35, told Us Weekly in an interview published April 30. “And I desperately needed it.”

While she didn’t expect to take such a long hiatus, Panettiere—who shares daughter Kaya, 10, with ex-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko—noted that stepping back allowed her to approach her career from a “different place in life.” Indeed, the actor hit a dark patch in her personal life, as she revealed that she struggled with alcohol, opioid addiction, and postpartum depression while filming Nashville from 2015 to 2018.

She started her break shortly after and didn’t return until 2023, where she reprised her iconic Scream 4 role as Kirby Reed in Scream VI.

“The things that I’ve done before…it was just different enough that I felt like it was a blank canvas that I could paint onto anything I wanted on,” she continued. “And now try to take my career in a direction that I wasn’t able to go in before.”

With this fresh perspective, the Bring It On: All Or Nothing star confirmed that she feels “much more solid and grounded.” But she emphasized this new “version” of herself is still a work in progress.

“It’s healthy to continue to keep evolving as a person, which I always try to do to keep reinventing ourselves, learning more things about ourselves, our wants, needs, dislikes and all the above,” Panettiere added. “But I’ve never been this version of me. I’ve never been as OK with being who I am without feeling the need to apologize for anything. I feel like I’ve finally earned the right to an opinion.”

This isn’t the first time she’s addressed her hiatus. As she geared up for her return to the Scream universe, Panettiere detailed her fears about her break from the big screen affecting her final girl acting skills.

“I was worried that I couldn't act anymore,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2023. “I mean, I took four years off. I had to remind myself of what I could do and to make sure that I could still do it. But I knew I made the right decision.”

Source:
courtesy of E!ONLINE

by Adrianne Reece

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