Ruby Rose Breaks Down at Hayden Panettiere’s Malibu Memorial

LOS ANGELES — Ruby Rose became emotional when asked how she hoped Hayden Panettiere would be remembered.

“That was my best friend,” Rose said during a Thursday press event for Fox’s Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. “We spoke every day for five years.”

Rose, known for Batwoman and Orange Is the New Black, had not intended to discuss grief at the Fox press junket. But a routine promotional question from Entertainment Tonight’s Denny Directo brought her back to the friendship and loss she had been carrying.

The moment arrived five days before a harder one: sitting through a celebration of life at Malibu Pacific Church on Saturday, where roughly 150 people gathered to say goodbye to Hayden Panettiere, who died at thirty-six on August 16, and found that the formal occasion made the loss no easier to hold.

Nashville co-stars Jonathan Jackson, Lennon Stella, and Charles Esten made the drive to Malibu. So did Paris Hilton and Beverly D’Angelo. Connie Britton, who played Rayna James to Panettiere’s Juliette Barnes for five seasons on the country music drama, gave remarks. Esten spoke as well. Panettiere’s father, Skip Panettiere, was among those present. Those there described the service as emotional and beautiful, roughly two hours of stories about a woman who had spent three decades in the public eye and who, by all accounts, saved her most honest self for the people who never published anything.

Wladimir Klitschko, Panettiere’s former partner and the father of her daughter Kaya, had marked what would have been her thirty-seventh birthday in late August. The daughter Panettiere left behind was ten years old.

Rose said she hadn’t expected the friendship. She’d been wary of celebrity closeness, having found the industry’s version of it unreliable. Panettiere had walked up at an event and simply announced: “Hey, I’m Hayden. Can we go talk somewhere? We’ve got a lot in common.” Rose laughed at the memory. “We had everything in common,” she said.

From that conversation grew a chosen family Rose described as now numbering fourteen people. “It’s a bigger group now; there’s 14 of us that we’ve collected over the years,” she said. “That’s my family.” The texture of the friendship was daily: texts, calls, check-ins, the small accumulation of five years. Then, on August 16, none of that.

In the days after Panettiere’s death, Rose posted on Threads what appeared to be a private message from Panettiere describing her mother’s treatment in her final weeks. “I was sobbing over her cruelty yesterday thinking, my god I’m 36 and she can still cause this kind of pain,” the message read. The post drew backlash from readers who felt the private correspondence should have stayed private. Rose did not address the criticism publicly.

Panettiere was thirty-six and had spent most of her life in front of a camera. The regenerating cheerleader she played on Heroes gave the NBC drama its most recognizable image in its first four seasons. Her portrayal of country star Juliette Barnes on Nashville, a character undone by addiction, then rebuilt by it, earned her a Golden Globe nomination in 2013. She returned to the Scream franchise four times, most recently in 2023. Months before her death, she published a memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, describing years of struggle with addiction in language that was, as Rose put it on Saturday, her story told her way.

“All that she ever wanted,” Rose said, “was to have her story told her way, on her terms.”

The fentanyl-laced oxycodone that killed her came from a Los Angeles dealer who had allegedly supplied her with black-market prescription drugs for years. She boarded a flight from California to South Carolina on August 15 and was found in cardiac arrest the following morning at a Greenville residence by her boyfriend, Brian Hickerson. The DEA investigation into the supplier had not resulted in publicly announced charges as of last week. The DEA’s involvement added a federal dimension to what Panettiere’s close circle had already understood as a systemic failure: the pill that killed her was not unusual, only traceable.

Rose will be back on Fox screens later this week. Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test premieres its fifth season Wednesday, September 24, available on Hulu the following day. The show places celebrities through military-style training and elimination rounds. She was there Thursday to promote that. She ended up talking about something else.

The chosen family of fourteen does not have a spokesperson. What they do next, whether they advocate publicly around fentanyl supply enforcement, what they say when the federal case reaches its conclusion, has not been announced. On Saturday in Malibu, for a few hours, the question was simply held.