Hayden Panettiere after the death of her brother: Emotional interview about her loss

A year and a half after her terrible loss, she is back on screen: Hayden Panettiere (35) opens up in an emotional interview about the sudden death of her brother, actor Jansen Panettiere (1994 – 2023): “I will always be heartbroken. No matter how many years pass, I will never get over his loss.”

“He was my only sibling and it was my job to protect him. When I lost him, I felt like I had lost half of my soul,” the actress (her new film “Amber Alert” opens in US cinemas on September 27th) admits honestly. She remembers not leaving the house. “I had to see horrible paparazzi pictures of me from Jansen’s funeral, which took place in a very private place, and it was shocking,” she tells the US magazine, whose cover is “People”. “My agoraphobia, which I had already struggled with in the past, got worse.”

Within a few days, the petite blonde was unrecognizable. “I was literally bloated,” she says of the rapid weight gain she experienced at the time. She says that the “stress and cortisol” led to this. “I didn’t feel strong enough to get dressed and leave the house, but I also knew that I had to get out and move, otherwise I would never stop looking and feeling that way,” reports Panettiere. “It became a destructive hamster wheel.”

With the help of a personal trainer, she worked on her physical problems and her mental ones: “The long walks were like a therapy session.”

Hayden Panettiere was also able to gain something positive from the sad loss: “When something so massive has happened to you, you really learn not to let little things upset you. Because once something so terrible, so profound, so catastrophic happens in your life, there is not much that can really shake you anymore.”

At the time of his death, she had just fought her way back to life

2023 was supposed to be a good year for the actress. She struggled with drug and alcohol problems for years and was finally clean and sober after Panettiere spent time in an inpatient rehab facility in early 2020. She had finally broken free from an abusive relationship with ex-boyfriend Brian Hickerson. “It was a very dark time,” she summed up in 2022. She was working again (on the set of “Scream VI”), enjoying her daughter Kayla (9), who has been growing up with her father Wladimir Klitschko (48) since suffering from postpartum depression. Her life was back on track.

Then, shortly before the horror film’s premiere in February 2023, the setback: Jansen Panettiere dies completely unexpectedly at the age of 28 from a previously undiagnosed heart condition.