Hayden Panettiere Reveals She Felt She Was 'Acting Out Her Own Life' With 'Traumatizing' 'Nashville' Role

Hayden Panettiere has complicated feelings about playing the role of Juliette Barnes on the hit country drama Nashville while struggling with addiction.

"I look back at it with curiosity more than anything," the Heroes actress reflected in a recent interview. "If I hadn't had done that — if I hadn't accepted Nashville and had all that time to be involved with other projects — then where would I be now?"

"It took six years of my career when I was at my physical prime, my mental, my everything, that I just wonder what it would have been like in the hiatuses, [if I] did one project or film, or was encouraged to do that," she continued. "Where would I be today?"

While Panettiere admitted there were "such great things about my personal life in Nashville," there were also aspects of the time she spent living in The Volunteer state that were also "very traumatizing."

"I felt like I was acting out my own life," she confessed. "Straight from the beginning, it was like, I'm dating a football player, [and then] Juliette dates a football player. And then they turned her into an alcoholic."

"Then they turned to her leaving her daughter and going to this crazy [place] in Europe, and it was very obvious," Panettiere — whose own daughter, Kaya, lives with her father in Ukraine — added.

"They weren't doing their homework. They weren't creating new storylines," the mother-of-one lamented. "They were just looking at my life and going, 'Oh, let's just take what she's going through and put our little spin on it.' And then, ta-da! It's done and done."

"I didn't have time to take care of myself [and] to think about and go through the pain I was experiencing physically [and] emotionally," she shared. "I just wanted to drum it out and watch mindless television and great shows. Anything to keep my mind off of that because I knew that next day I was going to be back at it again."

"I was like, tear central," she noted of working 12 to 20-hour days on set and acting out the personally painful content. "I don't even think on a soap opera that I cried as much [as I did] on Nashville."

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Panettiere spoke with The Messenger about her time on Nashville.