Hayden Panettiere is reflecting on her 12-year age gap relationship with ex Milo Ventimiglia.
“That’s hard. My daughter’s 11, so I’m trying to think of how I would feel,” Panettiere, 36, told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published on Friday, May 15.
Panettiere, who welcomed daughter Kaya with ex-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko in 2014, predicted that her little girl is probably “going to do exactly what Mommy did.”
“I’m ready and prepared for it, but I think it’s about the person,” she added.
Panettiere and Ventimiglia, 48, met on the set of NBC’s Heroes in 2006. They dated for nearly two years, starting in 2007 when she was 18 and he was 30.
Getty Images (2) Milo Ventimiglia has offered glimpses into his love story with wife Jarah Mariano. The couple initially sparked romance rumors in 2022 but kept their relationship out of the spotlight. Us Weekly broke the news in October 2023 that Ventimiglia and Mariano secretly exchanged vows in a private wedding ceremony among family and […]
“I was working with him all the time,” Panettiere recalled. “My family knew him well. I was also … At 18, I lived so much life that he almost couldn’t count me as being 18. So Milo and I, even though he was 30, had a lot more in common than people might think.”
The Ice Princess star continued, “But if it was somebody that was inappropriate, if it came off inappropriate or was somebody that my parents were like, ‘No, this is just a creepy situation,’ then they never would’ve allowed it to happen.”
Panettiere writes about her romance with Ventimiglia in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, out May 19. In her cover story with Us Weekly ahead of the book’s release, the actress said she considered marrying the Gilmore Girls alum before their split in 2009.
“Every relationship I’ve ever been in, I invested my whole self in,” Panettiere said. “I saw him as my partner and that it was going to hopefully keep going and evolving and lead to marriage.”
The Nashville alum continued, “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.”
Looking back on the final days of their romance, Panettiere recalled Ventimiglia breaking up with her and immediately taking her back when she started “hysterically” crying. The pair split for good soon after.
“One hundred percent, it was only because I was over the toilet, hysterically crying. It was like my world had crumbled,” she told Us of why they briefly reconciled. “It was so out of left field, nothing that big or explosive had happened. Nothing had really gone wrong. Nobody cheated. 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 Klitschko, 50, not long after splitting from Ventimiglia. They began dating in 2009 and got engaged in 2013, a few years before calling it quits in 2018.
Ventimiglia, meanwhile, married model Jarah Mariano in 2023. The couple welcomed their first child, daughter Ke’ala, in January 2025. One year later, they announced that they’re expecting baby No. 2.
