• Thora Birch publicly came out as bisexual at The Abbey’s 35th anniversary celebration in West Hollywood on May 20
• The Hocus Pocus and American Beauty actress, 44, said the LGBTQ+ community “shaped so much of who I am and my identity”
• Birch grew up in West Hollywood within walking distance of The Abbey, which has been an LGBTQ+ landmark since 1991
• She attended the event with her husband, director Michael Benton Adler, whom she married in 2018
• Birch also weighed in on a potential Now and Then sequel and her hopes for a Hocus Pocus 3 return

Thora Birch is living her truth — and she did it in the most fitting place imaginable.

The Hocus Pocus actress, 44, publicly came out as bisexual Wednesday night at The Abbey’s 35th anniversary celebration in West Hollywood, speaking to Us Weekly on the red carpet of the iconic LGBTQ+ institution where she essentially grew up. “As a hometown girl, I’m always here to show my support for the community, which shaped so much of who I am and my identity as well, being a bi person,” she said.

It was a meaningful setting for the reveal. Birch’s rep confirmed that the American Beauty star was raised in West Hollywood, within walking distance of The Abbey — which has been a beloved gathering place for the LGBTQ+ community since it opened in 1991, and was famously a favorite haunt of screen legend Elizabeth Taylor. For Birch, the rep said, the place has always felt like home.

She attended the anniversary party alongside her husband, director Michael Benton Adler, whom she married in 2018.

Beyond her own coming out, Birch used the moment to deliver a message that felt personal and urgent. “I don’t want to get too political, but find your community where you can, and stand with them, and stick with them, and share that love that you share together, and reach it toward others,” she said. “That’s the only way we’re going to get through all this madness is just embracing one another. We have to stop fighting.”

A Career That Keeps Expanding

Birch has been quietly building one of the more interesting second acts in Hollywood. She recently appeared in Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut The Chronology of Water, and currently plays Gifford Mayfair on AMC’s Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches. She also stepped behind the camera herself — making her directorial debut with Lifetime’s The Gabby Petito Story in 2022 — and has an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Mr. Paradise in the pipeline as her next directing project.

In a candid interview with the Independent earlier this year, she reflected on what it cost her to grow up famous. “You can’t develop friendships, or a core group of friends that stay with you,” she said. “So they were these amazing experiences, and opportunities to work with people that I had photos of on my bedroom walls. Would I trade it? No. But it has a heavy price.”

She spoke about peers like Brittany Murphy and Brad Renfro — both lost far too young — and what helped her navigate the same pressures that swallowed others. “What helped me was maintaining a sense of humor. That was key, and also dabbling in other mediums, taking a break, getting my education, living a life outside of any sort of bubble that has a camera pointed at it.”

On Now and Then, Hocus Pocus 3, and the Characters Fans Can’t Let Go

At the event, Birch also got candid about some of the roles her fans hold closest — and what a return to a few of them might look like.

When it comes to a Now and Then sequel, she’s all for it. Rita Wilson recently floated the idea publicly, and Birch is clearly on board. “You know, I love Rita, and bless her heart, and I feel like all of us would love that. I have no idea what that would look like, but it’s a shared dream for sure,” she said — before joking, “Talk to Michael De Luca,” referencing the former New Line Cinema president who distributed the 1995 film. The original featured an all-star cast including Christina Ricci, Demi Moore, Rosie O’Donnell, Melanie Griffith, and Wilson, with Birch playing the young version of Griffith’s character Teeny.

As for Hocus Pocus 3 — which was recently announced — Birch made clear she’d love a call. Her character Dani was notably absent from 2022’s Hocus Pocus 2 on Disney+, but she’s not holding a grudge. “I’d like to know what they land on for how Dani wound up. I’m super open to the idea,” she told Entertainment Tonight last October. Bette Midler, who is set to reprise her role as Winifred Sanderson, told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live around the same time that a script had arrived. “A lot of it was brilliant,” Midler said. “So I got very excited, and now we’re trying to figure out what it is and where it’s going to be and how much it’s going to cost.”

Birch also mused about other cult favorites — particularly Enid from Ghost World. “Who knows what she’s up to? She’s alive, probably,” she laughed, before acknowledging, “I think there’s also something nice about having them encapsulated.”

There’s something fitting about Birch choosing The Abbey — a place woven into her actual childhood, not just her public life — to share this part of herself. It wasn’t a press release or a carefully managed announcement. It was a hometown girl, at a neighborhood institution, saying something true.

The post Thora Birch Comes Out as Bisexual at The Abbey’s 35th appeared first on Cream.

• Hayden Panettiere, 36, publicly came out as bisexual for the first time in an interview with Us Weekly.
• The revelation comes ahead of her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, out May 19 via Grand Central Publishing.
• Panettiere says she dated women from a very young age but kept it private due to paparazzi, industry pressure, and fear of being dismissed as following a trend.
• The memoir also covers childhood trauma, addiction, domestic abuse, the loss of her brother Jansen, and her complicated relationship with her mother.
• She says this is the first time she has ever said the word “bisexual” out loud about herself.

Hayden Panettiere has something she’s been waiting 36 years to say out loud.

“I’m comfortable to confidently say that yes, I am bisexual,” the Heroes and Nashville alum told Us Weekly in an interview published May 6. “I said it! This is the first time I got to say it out loud.”

The admission came as Panettiere opens up about her life in her upcoming memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which drops May 19. The book took two years to write and covers, by her own description, everything — addiction, love, loss, abuse, and the very specific chaos of growing up famous. Her sexuality, she says, wasn’t something she planned to address when she sat down to write it. It just came up naturally, and she decided to go there.

“The first time it even crossed my mind to touch on this subject was while I was in the process of writing this book,” she said. “I did not know what I was going to feel comfortable touching on… and the fact that that did come up, I was like, ‘Why not?'”

Why She Waited So Long

Panettiere has known she was attracted to women since she was a child — she says she was “much more into women even as a child than I was men” — but the path to saying so publicly was long and full of obstacles, some external, some internal.

“It was either I was too young, and I was being forced to be perfect at all times. I was not encouraged to just be myself,” she explained. “Then came the period where it felt like people coming out, especially women, saying that they were bisexual or liked girls, was a fad. I was afraid that if I was honest, it was going to be like me jumping on the bandwagon.”

She didn’t want her truth dismissed as a trend. So she stayed quiet. And the longer she stayed quiet, the harder it got.

“And once again, it was always the fear of not being perfect, and what my team was going to think about it, what the public’s opinion was going to be about it,” she said. “It was a very difficult topic to articulate properly. I wanted to make sure that I really sat down and chose my words carefully.”

There was also the very practical reality of being one of the most photographed young women in Hollywood. Panettiere says she did date women — it started, she says, “at a very, very young age” — but the constant presence of paparazzi made those relationships feel impossible to protect.

“It was scary, though, because there were paparazzi always waiting for me outside, to follow me everywhere. I had very little privacy,” she said. “I have explored it, but because I hadn’t shared this with anybody, I didn’t really have the courage to throw myself fully emotionally into it. Because then if I did fall in love, that wasn’t something that I wanted to ever have to hide.”

She hasn’t fallen in love with a woman — yet. But the fear of having to conceal that love is what kept her from ever fully letting herself get there.

Looking back at her relationship with Heroes co-star Milo Ventimiglia, she can now see how her unspoken inner life was already creating distance. The two dated from 2007 to 2009, when she was 18 and he was 29. She says she was fully invested — “I saw him as my partner and that it was going to hopefully keep going and evolving and lead to marriage” — but there was one thing she could never bring herself to do.

“It was a point of contention that I was unable to put the ‘I’ in front of ‘love you,'” she reflected. “I could only say ‘love you’ in a casual way. Being older, he was much more aware of what that meant. And that said a lot.”

“It’s sad I had to wait until I was 36 years old to share that part of me,” she added. “But better late than never, right?”

A Memoir That Holds Nothing Back

Her sexuality is just one thread in what sounds like an extraordinarily raw book. This Is Me: A Reckoning covers ground that Panettiere has never publicly addressed — and some of it is genuinely alarming.

At 16, while doing press for Heroes, a representative gave her non-prescribed “happy pills” imported from Mexico. “I trusted her wholeheartedly,” she said. “I never in a million years thought to protect myself or question it.” That early introduction to substances would eventually spiral into a full-blown addiction that led to three separate stints in rehab.

The memoir also goes deep on her six seasons playing Juliette Barnes on Nashville — a character whose storylines about alcoholism, postpartum depression, and abandoning her child mirrored Panettiere’s own life with an almost surreal precision. She says the writers leaned into her real emotional range without anyone stopping to ask whether it was okay.

“They cared if the way it was affecting me had a negative impact on filming or on the show. But there was very little concern about my mental and emotional state,” she said. “I turned into Juliette Barnes. Juliette Barnes was me. I didn’t know where Hayden started and Juliette ended. Very few people took the time to come up to me and ask if I was OK. I don’t know that they wanted to know.”

She also writes about years of domestic abuse at the hands of ex Brian Hickerson — describing the experience of trying to leave an abusive relationship with a vividness that will resonate with anyone who has been there. “Getting an abusive person out of your life is like trying to rip a weed out that is so entangled into your life,” she said. “Every time you pull it out another weed pops back up. They always manage to find a way to slither back in, even if you’re an incredibly strong-willed person.” In 2020, Hickerson was charged with multiple domestic assault felonies and ultimately sentenced to 45 days in jail after pleading no contest to two felony counts of injuring a spouse or girlfriend. TMZ has reported the two were spotted together as recently as this past March, though sources say they are now just friends.

Her third and final rehab stint — eight months long — came after a doctor told her plainly that her body was shutting down. Her eyes had turned yellow from jaundice. She began researching liver transplants. “He told me, in no uncertain terms, that if you do not put a stop to this right now, your body’s not going to be able to recover,” she said.

That stay saved her life. And it was followed, cruelly, by one of the worst losses she’s ever faced.

The Loss She’s Still Processing

Panettiere’s younger brother, Jansen — who was also an actor — died after struggling with crack and heroin addiction. She had tried to get him into treatment, kept standing appointments with his therapist, did everything she could think of. It wasn’t enough.

“Of all the people that could have saved him from passing away, it should have been me,” she said. “But you realize that you can’t love somebody out of a situation like that if they’re not ready or willing to heal.”

Three years later, it still hits her the hardest of everything in the book. When she recorded the audiobook, that section broke her. “Every time it’s his anniversary of his death, or his birthday, it’s actually gotten more and more painful,” she said. “It’s still a struggle to combat the feeling of failure and guilt.”

Where She Is Now

The heaviness of everything she’s been through is real — but so is where she’s landed. Panettiere describes an “incredible” relationship with her ex-fiancé Wladimir Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion, and their 11-year-old daughter Kaya, who lives in Europe. In 2018, Klitschko demanded Panettiere relinquish custody while she was struggling with addiction — a moment she calls “absolutely one of the worst days of my life.” But she says she understands it now.

“I’m so grateful for Wlad. We’re very close, and have had a deep friendship, along with a relationship, since I met him when I was 19,” she said. “And my daughter, she’s just an incredible gift. She’s otherworldly and so kind and so fierce and surrounded by good people. She’s just the best thing — all the best parts of me and Wlad.”

When Russia’s war against Ukraine broke out in 2022, Panettiere flew to be with Kaya as Klitschko and his brother Vitali fought on the front lines. She sat her daughter down and asked if she had any questions. Kaya had just one: “Why is Putin doing this?” Panettiere laughs that it was the one question she truly couldn’t answer.

As for her relationship with her mother, Lesley Vogel — who pushed her into the industry starting at 8 months old — Panettiere says there’s no relationship right now. The memoir is, in part, her way of finally having that conversation. “I was so scared of her that approaching her and being honest about my feelings was not going to get me any positive reaction,” she said. “This is my way of doing it.” She leaves the door open, though. Just barely.

She’s also dealing with the fact that a stalker who spent years terrorizing her — sending threats, flooding her phone, forcing her to cancel public appearances — was recently released from prison after serving 30 months. “He’s now out,” she said simply. “That’s just a daunting… that’s the reality of the situation.”

Through all of it, Panettiere sounds like someone who has earned the right to finally just be herself — in every sense. Coming out as bisexual is one piece of that. A big one, but still just one piece.

“I think people will be surprised by what they learn,” she said of the memoir.

This Is Me: A Reckoning is out May 19.

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