Ruby Rose got visibly emotional talking about Hayden Panettiere on a red carpet Thursday, a little over a month after Panettiere's death at 36.

The Orange Is the New Black actress was at the premiere of Fox's Special Forces when Entertainment Tonight asked how she hopes her friend is remembered. "That was my best friend," Rose said. "We spoke everyday for five years."

She described a friendship neither of them saw coming. Rose said she'd gone in wary of celebrity friendships, given her own history with the industry, but Panettiere pushed past that on sight. "She ran up anyway and was like, 'Hey, I'm Hayden. Can we go talk somewhere? We've got a lot in common,'" Rose recalled, laughing at the memory even as she told it. "And then we went and talked, and we had everything in common."

Rose was standing alongside Collin Gosselin, son of Jon and Kate Gosselin of Jon & Kate Plus 8, for the interview. Panettiere, she said, wanted the kind of platform Rose and Gosselin now share to tell her own story on her own terms. Gosselin agreed. "She deserved it," he said, before adding a line aimed squarely at family dynamics in the industry: "I can't voice against it enough when parents don't look out for their children in this world."

That's a pointed reference. Panettiere had written at length about her relationship with her mother, Lesley Vogel, in her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, published in May. She told The Hollywood Reporter at the time that the material was among the hardest to put on paper, and that writing it forced her to confront how much the strain had cost her over the years.

She also wrote about the machinery of being a child star. "I was groomed. I was like a little soldier and I always have been," she said in that same interview. "No was never an option. It was just: Here are your scenes, here's your dialogue, memorize it, hit the marks, do what your director tells you to do. I took my marching orders."

Panettiere was found unresponsive on August 16 in a Greenville, South Carolina, Airbnb, along with her on-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson. Preliminary autopsy results turned up no signs of trauma. Local and federal authorities are still investigating what happened, and neither a cause of death nor a timeline for answers has been made public.

Rose's tribute is the first extended public statement from someone close to Panettiere since the memoir's revelations resurfaced in the wake of her death. Whether the ongoing investigation changes that conversation is still an open question.