Hayden Panettiere Learned the Real Reason for ‘Panic Room’ Recast Years Later

It’s never fun to be let go from a job, but finding out that you lost a role in what would go on to be a $197 million movie because your mom wouldn’t allow you to get a haircut? That one stings.

In Hayden Panettiere’s memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” she takes readers through her career, from her time as an 8-month-old model to “Nashville” and “Scream VI.”

But she also offers new insight into an iconic role she missed out on: playing Sarah Altman, the diabetic preteen in 2002’s “Panic Room,” directed by David Fincher.

Panettiere called Nicole Kidman, her would-be costar, ‘delightful’

After liking her performance in “Remember the Titans” alongside Denzel Washington and her audition, Fincher cast Panettiere, then 13, in “Panic Room” with Nicole Kidman, who would play Sarah’s mom, Panettiere wrote.

“I met Nicole Kidman, who was delightful,” Panettiere wrote. “I even made playdates with Nicole’s children, Isabella and Connor,” she continued, “I prayed that Nicole and I would fall into our roles as if we’d been born to play mother and daughter.”

However, after two weeks, Kidman pulled out of the movie due to an injury she sustained on 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!” that was aggravated during filming.

Panettiere was forced to leave Los Angeles and head back to the East Coast, waiting for weeks to see if Kidman would be replaced or if the film would be scrapped altogether.

‘It really felt like my entire future hinged on this film’

Eventually, Panettiere and her mother, Lesley Vogel (who was also her manager at the time), learned that Jodie Foster had been tapped to replace Kidman.

“I was overjoyed — even as happy as I’d been about Nicole Kidman. Jodie Foster was one of my favorite actors, and I could relate to her because she’d been working since she was a kid, just like me,” Panettiere wrote.

She also noted that people had said they looked alike, because they were both “small and strong.”

But the night before flying back to LA, Panettiere’s mother shared some bad news. Panettiere was told the producers “want to move on to someone else” because they weren’t sure she looked enough like Foster. Instead, they’d chosen a different child actor, Kristen Stewart.

Panettiere found out the real story years later

At the time, reporting said that Panettiere had dropped out of the film before Kidman did, though it was actually the other way around.

“Once Nicole was gone, I was out, too. I never got an explanation as to why, and at the time, I accepted it,” she wrote.

But years later, another of her former managers told Panettiere the truth, she said.

“The director spoke to Mom about cutting my hair so I would look more like Jodie Foster, who’s always rocked a great bob. Mom said no. It was a dealbreaker,” Panettiere wrote in her memoir.

Panettiere eventually severed her working relationship with her mom in 2008. “All I wanted was to discover what it was like to have a ‘normal’ mother-daughter relationship, and that dynamic didn’t involve contracts [or] producers,” she wrote.

The two are now estranged, with Vogel telling Page Six that she had chosen to go no-contact with her daughter after “20 years of trauma” and a “lack of empathy.”

Vogel did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.