Some years ago I read that when Chris Columbus and co. were choosing amongst the actors who’d play Harry, Hermione, and Ron, they made sure to look for children with stable families behind them. They knew they were about to create the biggest stars on the planet and that they’d need strong family support to bear the weight of this global fame with any measure of mental health. Of course the more cynical argument is that given the scale of the Harry Potter project, in both time and dollaroos, production couldn’t really afford the scandal/hassle of a main cast member1 going off the deep end before shooting wrapped.2
For the most part, you could argue the strategy worked. Like, Dan Radcliffe3 had his brush with alcohol abuse, Rupert Grint was driving an ice cream truck at some point, and Emma Watson wrestled with an American accent for years before finally giving up, but they all seem to be doing fine now. As fine as any thirty-something could be (she said, and you can jot this down, normally, and certainly not defensively).
In the matter of former child stars, this comes up often—how well-adjusted the above three appear, considering they grew up in the brightest limelight, a spectacle to entertain us on- and off-screen. It comes up often because such relative normalcy among former child stars of this magnitude is rare. We see the opposite trend repeatedly: Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen, Lindsay Lohan, Macaulay Culkin, Amanda Bynes, Drew Barrymore, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber … I could go on. It is insane what we put these children through, lives that frankly few adults would have the mental wherewithal to survive with their sanity intact.
And we don’t seem to be learning our lesson.
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Even without a personal tendency toward the parasocial, I’ve learned not to underestimate the impact of a celebrity’s death on my brain.
Before the notification of her death landed on my phone on Monday morning, I can’t say I’d given too much thought to Hayden Panettiere. Not recently, at least. But moments after reading the news, my mind started replaying parts of my childhood: watching Remember the Titans (2000) with my family approximately every two weeks, which was about as frequently as ABC Family would play the film4; seeing Ice Princess (2005) at the cinema and realizing that like Panettiere’s character, a girl could be bitchy and likable; for the last twenty-odd years, carrying on the thankless task of convincing people that Raising Helen (2004) is an underrated stone-cold classic, actually.5
And then, my senior year of undergrad, on [what I genuinely thought was] the cusp of adulthood, starting Nashville (2012-2018) and unironically adding its melodramatic country songs to my college playlists.6
(Don’t believe me? Here’s my all-encompassing “Fall” playlist I started in August 2013 and kept adding to until August 2020, when I decided enough was enough. To be fair, it’s a very good soundtrack to chilly Sundays.
The playlist’s got some questionable tunes but I stand by it.)
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Back in 2022, I read Jennette McCurdy’s heartwrenching and disturbing memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died and wrote:
Beyond the personal story, it made me think of how vulnerable children in the performing industry tend to be, at the mercy of adults who more often than not do not have their best interest at heart.
Panettiere’s own memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning wouldn’t come out until May of this year, but it chronicles many of the same struggles as McCurdy’s: financial and emotional manipulation by family members, isolation, growing up too fast and too publicly.