Hayden Panettiere is looking back on her 12-year age gap romance with Heroes costar Milo Ventimiglia, revealing that she’d considered marrying him before their breakup.
“Every relationship I’ve ever been in, I invested my whole self in,” Panettiere, 36, exclusively tells Us Weekly in this week’s cover story while discussing her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, out May 19. “I saw him as my partner and that it was going to hopefully keep going and evolving and lead to marriage.”
She goes on, “It was a point of contention that I was unable to put the ‘I’ in front of ‘love you’ and at the time, I didn’t realize or understand why it made me feel so uncomfortable. I could only say ‘love you’ in a casual way. Being older, he was much more aware of what that meant. And that said a lot.”
The large age gap between the costars — Panettiere was 18 and Ventimiglia was 30 when they started dating — generated lots of public chatter during the two-year relationship.
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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.”
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?”
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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.
