Hayden Panettiere he thinks about his 12 year gap relationship with ex Milo Ventimiglia.
“It’s hard. My daughter is 11, so I’m trying to imagine how I would feel,” Panettiere, 36, said. Entertainment Weekly in an interview published on Friday, May 15.
Panettiere, who welcomed daughter Kaya with her ex Wladimir Klitschko in 2014, she predicted that her little girl would probably “do exactly what Mommy did.”
“I’m ready and prepared for it, but I think it’s about the person,” he added.
Panettiere and Ventimiglia, 48, met on the set of NBC Heroes in 2006. They dated for about two years, starting in 2007 when she was 18 and he was 30.
“I worked with him all the time,” Panettiere recalled. “My family knew him well. And I was … When I was 18, I was living so many lives that you almost couldn’t count me at 18. So Milo and I, even though he was 30, had more in common than people would think.”
The Ice Princess star continued, “But if it was the wrong person, if it turned out to be inappropriate or if it was someone my parents were like, ‘No, this is just a scary situation,’ they would never have let it happen.”
Panettiere writes about her romance with Ventimiglia in her memoir, It’s Me: Countingcomes out May 19. In his cover story no Us Weekly Before the release of the book, the actress said that she thought about marrying the singer Gilmore Girls alum before their 2009 split.
“Every relationship I’ve ever been in, I’ve invested all my money in them,” Panettiere said. “I saw him as my partner and hopefully it will continue to evolve and lead to marriage.”
The Nashville alum continued, “It was a point of contention that I couldn’t put ‘I’ in front of ‘I love you’ and at the time, I didn’t see or understand why it made me feel uncomfortable. I could just say ‘I love you’ in a casual way. The older she got, the more she knew what that meant. And that meant a lot.”
Looking back on the final days of their romance, Panettiere remembers Ventimiglia breaking up with him and immediately taking him back when he started crying “obviously”. The two broke up soon after.
“One hundred percent, it’s because I was on the toilet, crying hysterically. It was like my world had collapsed,” he said. Us why they reconciled briefly. “It was out of left field, nothing big or explosions happened. Nothing really went wrong. Nobody cheated. I remember his face was shocked at how wrong my reaction was, and he immediately took it back.”
Panettiere met Klitschko, 50, not long after her split from Ventimiglia. They started dating in 2009 and got engaged in 2013, a few years before they split in 2018.
Meanwhile, Ventimiglia, who is a married model Jarah Mariano in 2023. The couple welcomed their first child, daughter Ke’ala, in January 2025. A year later, they announced they were expecting baby number 2.
