In the wake of Hayden Panettiere’s death, the director of one of her last films is opening up about his experience with her on set, saying the “energy in her room was pretty dark” at the time.
The actress, who worked with Griff Furst on his 2025 film A Breed Apart, died on Sunday at age 36 at an apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina.
“I had met Hayden about 10 years before that and I knew that she was insanely talented, so when she signed on to do this picture that we were shooting, I was psyched,” Furst began in a video recently posted on Instagram. “I really wanted to work with her.”
He then recalled realizing “something was off” with Panettiere while filming, making a point to mention the actress’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Brian Hickerson’s presence when he would visit the A Breed Apart set.
“So I’m on set, and I get word from the movie’s security team who picked her up from the airport that something was off,” Furst continued. “I didn’t think much about it, and so I left set and I walked over to greet her and her boyfriend Brian. He opened the door. Hayden was incredibly sweet and gracious and excited to work, but she was not OK.”
“I’m not going to get into the details of why that was, but having worked on over 100 movies and seeing just about everything, it was pretty clear that she wasn’t okay and the energy in her room was pretty dark,” the director added.
Amid the investigation into Panettiere’s death, a police report said Hickerson and his brother were at the scene when the actress was pronounced dead by authorities. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office said that her cause and manner of death remain pending further investigation, and that there were no obvious signs of trauma. However, officials were reportedly heard discussing an “overdose” and “cardiac arrest” on the 911 call at the time of her death.
Panettiere had been open about her struggles with alcohol and opioid addiction, further detailing her experiences in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, released earlier this year. In the book, she also detailed physical abuse by Hickerson.
The actress’ mother, Lesley Vogel, also recently broke her silence on her daughter’s death, criticizing Hickerson, saying, “This person in her life that we have been trying to get rid of for quite some time was with her at her death and that was Brian Hickerson.”
In Furst’s Instagram video, the director added that he “believed she was getting better” and that he and Panettiere “talked about doing another picture together recently, which is what makes this shitty news hit even harder.”
