Hollywood likes child actors to be precocious, to convey an “old soul,” to give the impression of hidden depths that, if we’re being perfectly honest, you only occasionally see when you’re dealing with actual children.
But precocity isn’t the same as maturity, and when young actors grow up, it isn’t always easy to make that transition — to go from being a child who performs in ways that are recognizably adult to being an adult who performs in ways that are recognizably human.
From her earliest screen appearances, Hayden Panettiere excelled at precocity.
I’ve already had debates today, in the aftermath of Panettiere’s tragic death at the age of 36, about whether or not Panettiere stole Remember the Titans from Denzel Washington and a cast of up-and-coming stars. It’s a very real debate. Not many actors could even debatably steal movies from Denzel Washington, much less actors who weren’t even 10.
As Sheryl Yoast, football-obsessed daughter to Will Patton’s Bill Yoast, Panettiere plays what is a fairly common genre archetype: the adorable moppet raised by a sports-obsessed parent to talk about sports like a 50-something man at a barber shop. Almost all of her dialogue is written so that it would sound normal as part of a talk radio call-in show, but delightfully alien from a kid. Precocity! But in a movie in which almost every choice accentuates tear-jerking and other emotional manipulation, Panettiere’s performance is notable for how natural she makes a character who is presented as unnatural.
It’s easy to watch Remember the Titans and understand why Ryan Gosling became a star or recognize the attributes essential to the ongoing careers of Donald Faison, Ryan Hurst and Ethan Suplee. It’s just as easy to recognize Panettiere’s screen presence, beyond her ability to elicit amusement at her character’s wise-beyond-her-years obsession with the gridiron.
You can see the seeds, in that performance, of what made her so in-demand for projects like Ice Princess, Raising Helen and whichever Bring It On sequel she starred in. Television roles like her work on late-run Ally McBeal and even her guest appearances on Malcolm in the Middle pointed to a young actor who radiated energy, without necessarily promising that a mature actress would necessarily emerge.
Countless capable child stars have done precocity, and then never anything else — or have never gotten the opportunity to try anything else.
Part of why NBC’s Heroes worked as well as it did when it premiered in September 2006 is that the series treated Panettiere’s Claire not as a child, but as the person on whose shoulders the fate of the world rested. Some of the promotion of and reaction to Claire fetishized her youth and the cheerleader outfit and all of that, but that’s not what the show itself mostly did — and it certainly wasn’t what Panettiere played.
Yes, the central mission of the first season was for the other characters to save Claire. But the internal struggle of an ordinary young woman discovering an extraordinary ability to heal, to face a dangerous world with a reduced capacity for feeling pain, was a complex and heroic thing on its own. It was an adult performance that the series only occasionally knew what to do with; after that first season, Heroes never lived up to its full potential and Panettiere didn’t always have as much to play or to play well.
Being a young actor continuing to work as you grow comes with the risk that Hollywood won’t be prepared to let you age to that next level. But Panettiere’s second series lead role, in ABC’s Nashville, immediately pushed her out of “young” parts and into onscreen adulthood.
The show, which launched in 2012, immediately introduced Panettiere’s Juliette as a diva, a bad girl, an adversary for Connie Britton’s Rayna James. But in the story of a young woman who started fighting for autonomy after years as a juvenile cog in the music industry, Panettiere found something relatable. Juliette did plenty of bad things in the early seasons of Nashville (and beyond), but Panettiere rarely played those choices as merely motivated by a hunger for success or power. Raised professionally on soap operas, the actress presumably knew what a soap opera villain looks and feels like, but Juliette was, instead, first and foremost an industry survivor.
Nashville ended in 2018 and Panettiere wasn’t even 30. She’d been a child star and she’d been the anchor of two very different broadcast dramas — as a young adult and then an adult — showcasing very different sets of skills. She had achieved what seemed like the most difficult part of a professional evolution.
She never starred in another television series. Other than her return to the Scream franchise in 2023, none of her film work had much visibility. Rather, there were reports about bad relationships and postpartum depression and other struggles chronicled in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
The career that felt hard-earned and hard-won from Remember the Titans through Nashville never got that next chapter, those next many chapters.
I can’t conclude this piece without acknowledging: In the past few years, younger millennials have grieved the loss of a number of actresses whose onscreen growth paralleled their own. Panettiere, Michelle Trachtenberg, Daveigh Chase and others aren’t unified by any one thing — their deaths weren’t the same, their lives in the industry weren’t the same and their support systems weren’t the same. But I still feel comfortable saying this, because it shouldn’t be controversial: Hollywood needs to do better.
Young people slip through the cracks in different ways in every walk of life and every part of the country, whether they have supportive parents, negligent parents or overly meddlesome parents. The challenges of life might be magnified for a movie star compared to a barista or grocery bagger or aspiring teacher, but demons are demons, exploiters are exploiters, heartbreak and addiction and depression don’t care how many people want to take your picture on a red carpet.
And I know that many or most of Panettiere’s struggles came well after her child stardom, and many were outside of any Hollywood purview.
But it’s incumbent on film and television studios, on record labels, on professional sports franchises to have better track records when it comes to protecting and nurturing young people. We’ve had too much evidence that, despite countless shameful documentaries and journalistic exposes, the industry treats kids as a renewable resource rather than a precious resource.
I don’t have solutions or individuals to shame or, honestly, anything to add other than this obvious sentiment, and sadness.
