Hayden Panettiere's 'Nashville' TV show premieres

Hayden Panettiere's 'Nashville' TV show premieres


October 11, 2012 (NASHVILLE) -- When we last saw Hayden Panettiere she was one of the ''Heroes'' on the NBC series.

She was the cheerleader with healing powers. Now, she's the up-and-coming country star on the new ABC series "Nashville." Panettiere says her new role is dream come true, because she gets to act and sing.

She adds she has a lot in common with her character, by coming to fame in her teens. Nashville premiered Wednesday night.

Panettiere says starring in the new show is a perfect fit and says she's proud to be part of the new ABC drama. She says it is full of drama from the get-go and feels like her life has been preparation for the role of country star Juliette Barnes.

OFFSTAGE: Hayden Panettiere Is Ready for Nashville

(CMT Offstage keeps a 24/7 watch on everything that's happening with country music artists behind the scenes and out of the spotlight.)

Actress Hayden Panettiere isn't just going to play the part of Juliette Barnes when the new ABC drama, Nashville premieres Wednesday (Oct. 10). She's going to sing the part, too. She will be providing her own vocals on the country music series, and it seems like she is a natural. "I always said if I was ever going to do music again, I'd do country," Panettiere told Women's Health magazine. "There's honesty and truth in it." Panettiere has mostly done pop songs for Disney soundtracks in the past, but some of her favorite singers in real life are the Dixie Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Lady Antebellum, Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean. In the new TV series, her character's album is titled All My Angels, so the show's costume designer will have her in all kinds of short pink and white dresses, dangly sparkly earrings and 5-inch Jimmy Choos. Panettiere got her acting start in soap operas like One Life to Live and Guiding Light, so I'm sure she'll fit in perfectly in this role about what really goes on behind the scenes in Music City.

Nashville star Hayden Panettiere on Taylor Swift, her failed singing career and her own sexual awakening

She can’t quite nail all the details, but when it comes to her youth, Hayden Panettiere remembers the important stuff.

“I understand now that what your parents listen to makes a huge impact on you and what you remember of what your childhood,” she says, considering her words carefully. “My dad always listened to Pavarotti and Ponchielli, he was very proud to be Italian, but he would listen to country music all the time too. My mom loved Faith Hill…we listened to a lot of country when we were younger. I can’t think off the top of my head exactly who, but I remember growing up constantly with country music.”

Now 23, the actress who began her career in a Playskool commercial at the tender age of 11 months is finally channeling those memories – along with several other life-changing moments — into her role as country music’s hottest ingénue Juliette Barnes on the new show Nashville.

Sitting in the bowels of CTV headquarters dressed in a tight-fitting white cocktail frock, Panettiere recalls the time in her life when, like Barnes, she was being groomed to be the next big thing in the music scene.


Having just completed a series of feel-good films (Ice Princess, Tiger Cruise) in which the fresh-faced actress got to showcase her singing as well as acting talents, she suddenly had a choice to make. As she was about to cross over as the immortal cheerleader Claire Bennet on NBC’s cult series Heroes, the spritely blonde says she was given an opportunity to become a crossover singer-actress — in the vein of Hilary Duff or, more recently, Selena Gomez and iCarly’s Miranda Cosgrove.

“I started an album for about five years when I was younger and it just didn’t end up being the kind of music I wanted to be involved with,” she says, blaming her failure to produce on both outside pressure as well as her own youthful vacillations. “I was 15-years-old, and especially as a girl you’re going back and forth and back and forth, you’re going, ‘I want to be a rock star, I want to be a pop star, I want to be a princess, I want to be a ballerina, I want to be this, I want to be that.’

“That’s in that development period where you’re not supposed to know, you’re just supposed to grow and learn and then get to an age where you finally figure it out, hopefully. And for me that was right in that sweet spot so I didn’t really know what I wanted to be but I knew that that’s not…it wasn’t that.”

“I had this horrible image of myself going up on stage and being forced to do some sort of in line dance,” she concludes, laughing.  “I was like, ‘No, I can’t do this. Please don’t make me do it.’ But I said if I ever was going to do music again I would sing country music.”
Nashville star Hayden Panettiere on Taylor Swift, her failed singing career and her own sexual awakening
Canada.com talks to Hayden Panettiere

Six years later, she will finally get her chance when Nashville premieres this Wednesday on CTV Two in Canada and ABC in the U.S. (a soundtrack album produced by the show’s musical supervisor T-Bone Burnett is set to follow). In the series, Panettiere plays opposite Connie Britton’s Rayna James, an aging star whose fame is fading with every passing day while Panettiere’s blonde, sexy Barnes burns up the charts.

If the concept sounds familiar to the real life relationship between new country superstars like Taylor Swift and the genre’s former giants like Reba Mcentire, that’s not a coincidence. However, Panettiere warns, while the show goes to painstaking lengths to be authentic, she thinks the comparisons between the ambitious, yet emotionally damaged Barnes and the perpetually surprised Swift end at the superficial.

“I don’t think Taylor acts like this off camera,” she says, referring to her character’s damaged family past and use of sex as a means for controlling the men in her life. “I don’t think she has these family issues off camera.  I don’t think she’s that malicious off camera. This is a very individual girl. I think besides her age and the fact that she has blonde hair and is the new face of country – just because they’re similar like that doesn’t make them they’re similar people. I don’t think they’re similar people.”

As for her own experiences growing up in the business, Panettiere says that despite being a late bloomer, she has come to understand that sexuality is just part of the business.

“My mom used giving me S-H-I-T all the time because I was such a tomboy. She was like, ‘Oh my god, you need to find your femininity Hayden, please.’”

Which is to say, “Sexuality wasn’t something that immediately came naturally to me when I was younger so it was something that I had to become familiar with.”

“I am comfortable doing sexually suggestive things [on set],” she says of the revealing and reviling scenes her character rakes part in. “It was something I knew I’d have to become comfortable with and it’s not foreign to this business.

“There’s a lot of the backstage, off camera ‘schmoozing.’ And I’m not saying you use your sexuality in a bad way but it becomes part of your social psyche; it just becomes sometimes part of that aspect of getting to know people and the confidence and I think confidence and sexuality are a very fine line. They border on a very fine line. Sometimes they can be mistaken but I knew in this business that this was something that I would have to become comfortable with.”

Just like her character.

'Nashville' Premiere: It's Not As Simple As Connie Britton Vs. Hayden Panettiere (VIDEO)

One of the most highly anticipated new series of the fall was ABC's "Nashville." The musical drama pitted a country music legend with 20 years under her belt against a new crossover pop-country belle. Connie Britton and Hayden Panettiere wasted no time in the premiere making it very clear how their characters felt about one another.

In their first meeting, Juliette Barnes (Panettiere) first dissed Rayna James (Britton) by ignoring her completely, and then told her "a charming story" about her mother listening to Rayna's music when Juliette was in the womb.

The two shared a label as the episode premiered, though the new head of that wanted to pair the two of them up as co-headliners -- with Juliette performing second. Instead of signing on, Rayna walked out. Now she's in need of a plan, while her father is working his own agenda. He convinced Rayna's husband to make a run for mayor.

All of this is handled with believable character moments. As HuffPost TV's Maureen Ryan wrote, "'Nashville' manages to be unforced and unhurried, yet it percolates with purposeful energy, and it smoothly introduces a series of characters who seem lived-in and real."

Will you be back for more "Nashville," Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC?