When Hayden Panettiere arrived as Claire Bennet in Heroes, in 2006, she was 17 but not a newcomer. She’d starred in Tiger Cruise, a Disney Channel movie, two years before and was the pin-perfect image of that teen-star world – blond, cute, perky, resourceful and all-American. Bennet the superhero was all those things, amped up to the point of fascinating distortion.
She was a cheerleader who could endlessly regenerate. It was a topic of hot debate on fan sites whether or not she could feel pain, a question that was resolved piecemeal through the series. She could, but could instantly overcome it with her superpower – that fact partly informed the view of one academic, professor Olvido Andújar Molina, that Bennet was standing in for the American dream, its core components being strength, resilience and a sweet-natured homeliness.
In Tiger Cruise, Panettiere had filled a similar role, the cute-as-a-button daughter of a naval commander, producing this elemental, almost mournful Oz-like message: “Everything you long for is right here at home.” She was from a showbiz family, her mother, Lesley Vogel, was a soap actor, and her brother, Jansen, who also possessed those perfectly symmetrical features, co-starred in Tiger Cruise, and later, in 2011, in The Forger (better known as the last film Lauren Bacall ever made). Jansen also died horribly young, of complications from an engorged heart, in 2023 aged 28. Panettiere got her first soap opera gig, in One Life to Live, at the age of four, and went on to a recurring role into Guiding Light before she was 10.
She was the voice of Dot in A Bug’s Life, and was nominated for a Grammy for her work on the film. Perhaps because of how the cheerleader role landed on the collective imagination, and certainly because of Panettiere’s performance, which had a magnetic complexity that always seemed at odds with how appealing she was, Bennet came to define Heroes. The showrunners originally intended to refresh the superheroes each series, to create a giant stable of ridiculously capable archetypes.
In the end, bowing to audience preference, they wrote Panettiere into all six seasons. At one fan convention, Panettiere addressed how she was funnelled towards certain roles by her inescapably wholesome good looks: “People look at me as either the popular cheerleader type or just the blond.” When Heroes ended in 2010, perhaps trying to branch out, she took the lead role in Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy, an ill-conceived and poorly received project. But in 2012, a role came along in Nashville, which was perfect for her.
As Juliette Barnes, a young country singer in a hurry, Panettiere embodied that bubble gum country music trope, the Dolly-Parton-beautiful singer on to whom a nation projects all its fantasies – of sweetness and innocence, of pluck. That ran for six seasons, and viewers lapped it up, with its excesses of plot and heartache and intrigue, especially in the first two seasons. Despite her on-screen success, Panettiere’s personal life was turbulent; after the birth of her daughter in 2014, she suffered postnatal depression.
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