Several former child actors are speaking out following the death of Hayden Penettiere, saying there’s a lesson Hollywood needs to take from it: young actors need better protections.
Over the past week, former child actors including Anna Paquin and Melissa Gilbert, have been sharing their own challenges with balancing fame and mental health, describing how vulnerable they felt while working at a young age, and sharing ideas to bring change to the industry.
Panettiere died earlier this month at age 36. While the cause of her death is still unknown, it has revived discussions about her struggles with mental health and substance abuse, which she detailed in her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, released in May this year. She isn’t the only recently deceased former child actor to have faced such issues.
In June, actor Daveigh Chase, who voiced Lilo in Disney’s 2002 animated feature Lilo & Stitch, died at 35, of complications from AIDS and polychronic substance abuse, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. In the days after her death, her father confirmed to media that she had been homeless.
In February last year, Harriet the Spy and Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor Michelle Trachtenberg died as a result of complications from diabetes. She also underwent a liver transplant in the months before her death at age 39.
Paquin, a Canadian-born actor who has been acting since she was 11-years-old when she won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for The Piano, said in a post on Instagram last weekend that their untimely deaths are no coincidence.
She wrote that children on sets are prematurely sexualized, and many of these “female, child ‘stars’ have profoundly sad lives and untimely ends.”
The systems in place to protect these young actors may look good on paper, Paquin said, but her experience was they weren’t as protective as they should have been.
Naming the problem
Gilbert, who worked as a child actor on the series Little House on the Prairie starting in 1974, wrote about the deaths of the former child actors on her Substack saying, “when three of us die so close together, something is very, very wrong.”
She said that child actors are expected to deliver without question, no matter what, lest they seem difficult, something she suggested makes them prone to exploitation.
“These young professionals are children, and we should make sure they are allowed to be children. They should be allowed to say ‘no’. Not push through physical or emotional pain. Not be made to support their entire families. And most certainly not to be followed everywhere they go by cameras, phones and prying, exploitive eyes,” wrote Gilbert.
Her comments come as her husband, actor Timothy Busfield, is currently awaiting trial on charges of child sex abuse that are tied to his work as a director on the set of the TV series The Cleaning Lady, which ran from 2022 to 2025. Gilbert has defended Busfield, who denies the allegations.
The public is just starting to understand the cost of becoming famous at an early age, wrote Even Stevens actor Christy Carlson Romano in an opinion piece for Elle magazine last week.
She also highlighted how much the job can affect a young actor’s self confidence, writing, “Kid actors have something major in common: rejection. We’re rejected from auditions more times before we’re 10 than most people accrue in 10 lifetimes … All before our frontal lobes have fully formed. Is it any wonder so many of us struggle with addiction?”
Carlson Romano — who started working at 12 and was acting in three Disney Channel projects simultaneously by the time she was 18 in 2002 — compared early fame to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, a progressive degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.
“We now have language for youth sports: protocols, helmets, parents worried about concussions. But we have almost no language for what happens when stress, scrutiny, rejection, adult pressure, and the collapse of privacy become the architecture of a childhood,” she wrote.
A new reckoning
The world of children’s television was recently the subject of a 2024 Investigation Discovery documentary series called Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV.
The series focused on working conditions at Nickelodeon, which former child actors and employees have alleged included sexual abuse, underpayment and a hostile work environment rife with misogyny.
Now, in the wake of such allegations and the recent deaths, veteran actors are publicly discussing ways to take matters into their own hands.
Paquin addressed part of her Instagram post to other child actors, asking them to contact her.
“I believe you and will stand by your side. You aren’t alone,” she wrote. “Let’s have each other’s backs. It might make public disclosure less terrifying.”
Gilbert took Paquin’s show of support as a call for former child actors to band together, writing that it was clear that no one else would act on their behalf.
“Our union has really been unable to do anything substantive about this,” she wrote. “Sure, there’s a young performers committee, but it is essentially toothless, political and tends to get short shrift because there are always bigger fish to fry. They have handbooks and orientations but no real functioning, well-funded, far-reaching support group.”
Gilbert, who served as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 2001 to 2005, suggested that she and other former child actors should start their own group and meet with the head of networks.
In a statement provided to CBC News, a spokesperson for SAG-AFTRA disputed Gilbert’s claim that the union hadn’t taken meaningful action.
“The contracts negotiated by SAG-AFTRA for minors include comprehensive protections for young performers. Additionally, the union often improves these provisions,” the statement said. “Additionally, the union recognizes the important role that educators, like the Studio Teacher members of IATSE Local 884, play in protecting minor performers.”
Raquel Lee, a former child actor who appeared in the Quiet on Set documentary, and has spoken about her experience as a young Black actor working on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show in the early 2000s, also weighed in.
“The fight continues” she wrote on her Instagram stories Sunday, sharing a quote from former actor and MeToo campaginer Rose McGowan regarding Panetierre’s death.
Lee is also coming forward with her own allegations of abuse.
According to Variety magazine, Lee filed a lawsuit against Disney last Friday, alleging a former employee of the company raped her when she was 14 and working on the film The Poof Point. Variety notes that the lawsuit alleges the man, who was involved in the filming of the movie, “groomed her, sexually harassed and assaulted her during filming.”
Disney has not responded to a request from CBC News for comment on the matter.
On her Instagram stories, Lee shared a photo of her younger self, writing “I will always fight for her! I am who I am today because SHE SURVIVED!”
