Hello Hayden fans! Hayden Panettiere recently got interviewed by GQ to talk about her return to the Hollywood scene and how her successful comeback on “Scream VI” helped her reclaim her narrative. For that article, they used photos from the 2022 sessions with Storm Santos.

The once prolific actress took a five year hiatus while her personal life became tabloid fodder. But now that she’s survived her demons, returning to her most empowering role provided the best comeback.

Scream 4, released in 2011, introduced us to Hayden Panetierre’s Kirby—the cool-girl film nerd, always armed with a barbed quip and film trivia to make sure you know she knows more than you. It was left ambiguous at the end of the film whether Kirby made it or not, but her survival was made explicit in the fifth film, when Kirby’s number appears on Deputy Dewey’s phone and a blink-and you’ll-miss-it thumbnail of Panettiere shows up in a YouTube interview with Woodsboro survivor Kirby Reed.

In Scream VI, adult Kirby retains much the same qualities in spades, only now she’s an FBI special agent focusing on the Ghostface killings in particular. Playing an adult version of Kirby was exciting, Panettiere says, because she always felt like Kirby would never be a victim. “I was so excited to find out where they were taking Kirby because trauma can do different things to different people. Trauma can cause certain people to be terrified, afraid of their own shadows, put 10 locks on their doors, have their own house turned into Fort Knox. Or people can come out fighting,” she continues, “That’s really one of the things that I loved about Kirby, that she’d go straight into ‘I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I want the bad guys to be afraid of me.’”

After some slight misdirection, and a ten-minute period in which Kirby seems like she might be the new Ghostface, that’s exactly what we get from the character in Scream VI. For this to be Panettiere’s first role post surviving her own demons feels poetic—a place for her to explore what she was in the first half of her career and what she worked through during her self-imposed hiatus. While it’s something she initially considered in relation to Kirby, it’s something she also thinks comes with age. “As we get older, we have more experience in our lives. There’s not a whole lot that we end up not being able to relate to at one point or another. It doesn’t have to be the exact same thing, but you become familiar with the feeling of it. That makes it a heck of a lot easier and more therapeutic,” she says.

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