feature image photo by Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images via Getty Images
Did you ever find inspirational meaning in romantic fan-edits of the relationship between Heroes‘ Claire, a former cheerleader at the apex of a noted world-saving scenario, and Gretchen, her college roommate / brief paramour? Well, it’s possible that Hayden Panettiere did too, because in an interview with US Weekly ahead of the release of her memoir, This is Me: A Reckoning, Panettiere has come out as bisexual.
“It took two years to write this book, and I did not know what I was going to feel comfortable touching on … and what stories were naturally going to come up, and the fact that that did come up, I was like, ‘Why not?’” she told US Weekly. “I’ve chosen to be completely brutally honest about this, and that’s something about me that I was never able to share with the world, because it was just never the right time.”
She shared that she started dating women from a “very young age” and was much more into women than men while growing up, but had a lot of fear around it due to the perseverance of paparazzi and her lack of privacy. Moreso, however, she felt like nobody ever encouraged her to be herself and she was instead forced into a perfection-shaped box. It never felt like the right time to come out: “I wanted to make sure that I really sat down and chose my words carefully and was able to tell my story in an honest way, that people understood. On one hand, it’s sad that I had to wait till I was 36 years old to share that part of me, but better late than never, right?”
Despite the experiences dating women she did have, she always had to hold herself back: “I didn’t really have the courage to throw myself fully, emotionally into it, because then if I did fall in love, that wasn’t something that I wanted to ever have to hide. I didn’t feel confident enough, and I was too afraid to really let that part of me explore that part of me.”
But, lucky for all of us: “Now that I know that this book is coming out, and that I’ve chosen to share it with the world, I’m comfortable saying I’m bisexual. I’m comfortable to confidently say that, yes, I am bisexual.”
Panttiere publicly dated her Heroes co-star, Milo Ventimiglia. She also dated Brian Hickerson from 2018 to 2020, and had an 11-year-old daughter with her ex, Wladimir Klitschko, whomst she dated from 2013 through 2018.
Hayden has been modeling and acting since she was a literal baby, with her full-time acting career kicking off in 1994 with a role on ABC soap opera One Life to Live. She got big-time famous with her starring role as cheerleader Claire Bennet in NBC’s Heroes, who had a sweeps-week-lesbian-kiss turned romance in its later seasons. She also co-starred with Connie Britton in musical drama Nashville from 2012 through 2018. In the cinematic realm, Hayden is best known for Bring it On: All Or Nothing, I Love You Beth Cooper and playing Kirby Reed in Scream 4 and Scream VI, who our Managing Editor Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya notes she “always misremembers as canonically bi.” Furthermore, she has long been the face of Neutrogena.
Hayden’s memoir follows her journey from a child star to a teenage it girl, and the complicated reality that lay beyond her public image, including her struggles with “postpartum depression, addiction and recovery, trauma, domestic abuse, and loss.” In 2022, Hayden opened up about her addictions to opioids and alcohol, a situation that eventually resulted in having to send her daughter to live with her ex-fiancé, a world-champion boxer, in Europe. In 2023, two years after her third and final trip to rehab, her brother, Jansen, also an actor, passed away suddenly in 2023 at the age of 28, due to a heart condition.
This is Me debuts May 19th and it appears as though I will in fact be reading it! GIve yourself a smooth-brain gift today in celebration.
