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Hayden Panettiere has opened up about her past romance with her former Heroes co-star Milo Ventimiglia, reflecting on their significant 12-year age difference and her thoughts on marriage during their relationship. In an exclusive interview with Us Weekly for this week’s cover story, Panettiere, who is now 36, shared insights from her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which is set to be released on May 19.
“Every relationship I’ve been in, I’ve always put my whole self into it,” she revealed. “I viewed him as my partner and hoped that our relationship would continue to grow, eventually leading to marriage.”
She continued, “I struggled with putting an ‘I’ in front of ‘love you,’ and didn’t understand why it made me uncomfortable at the time. I could only say ‘love you’ in a more casual sense. Being older, Milo had a clearer understanding of what that meant, and it spoke volumes about our dynamics.”
Their relationship, which lasted for two years, sparked considerable public attention due to their age difference—Panettiere was 18, while Ventimiglia was 30 when they began dating.
Beyond her personal life, Panettiere has been channeling her own experiences into her work. She brings a depth of emotion to her latest role in the psychological thriller Sleepwalker. Drawing from her life as a mother and her past experiences with sleepwalking, she portrays Sarah, a grieving mother coping with the loss of her daughter, exploring the limits of a mother’s endurance in the face of tragedy.
Panettiere and Ventimiglia originally got together in 2007 before going their separate ways in February 2009. At the time, a source exclusively told Us that there was “a lifestyle conflict” and that the Heroes costars were in “very different places.”
Looking back on that tumultuous time, Panettiere shares with Us that the final days of her relationship with Ventimiglia were hectic, as he broke up with her and then immediately took her back when she started “hysterically” crying. The two ultimately split for good a short time later.
Asked whether she thought Ventimiglia only took her back because of her tears, she admits to Us, “One hundred percent it was only because I was over the toilet, hysterically crying. It was like my world had crumbled.”
“It was so out of left field, nothing that big or explosive had happened. Nothing had really gone wrong. Nobody cheated,” she points out. “I remember the look on his face being pure shock at how visceral and massive my negative reaction was, and he immediately took it back.”
Milo Ventimiglia and Hayden Panetierre in July 2007 in Hollywood, California. Michael Buckner/Getty Images
Panettiere met boxer Wladimir Klitschko not long after splitting from Ventimiglia and they were ultimately together on and off from 2009 to 2018. (They welcomed a daughter, Kaya Evdokia Klitschko, in December 2014.)
The Nashville alum officially comes out as bisexual in her memoir, revealing that she never felt comfortable discussing her attraction to women until recently.
“It was always the fear of not being perfect, and what my team was going to think about it, what the public’s opinion was going to be about it,” she tells Us. “It was just never the right time, and it was a very difficult topic to articulate properly. 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?”
Rollercoaster romance. Hayden Panettiere and Brian Hickerson’s relationship has been marred by legal trouble since the couple were first linked in August 2018. The Nashville alum moved on with Hickerson after her split from fiancé Wladimir Klitschko. Panettiere and the former professional boxer began dating in 2009. The pair briefly broke up in 2011 but got engaged […]
Panettiere adds, “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. I said it!”
This Is Me: A Reckoning hits shelves on Tuesday, May 19.