Nearly 12 years later, Lea Michele recently reflected on the 2013 death of her Glee co-star and late boyfriend Cory Monteith.
The 2x Golden Globe nominee explained that she “just completely broke” after Monteith died at age 31 of combined heroin and alcohol toxicity, noting that her relationship with her co-stars felt “really fractured” following his death.
“I was 26 and no one handed me a guidebook. It was a fast education on more stuff than I could ever even process,” she said on the Therapuss podcast of grieving in the public eye.
“If we didn’t show up for work then people wouldn’t have work to go to,” added Michele. “And that was a lot of pressure for me, so I had to put my stuff aside and just show up, so that everybody could continue to work.”
When asked if Monteith’s death brought the cast closer together, she explained, “I think it really fractured so much. I mean, I can’t speak for everyone — I think that maybe, in some ways, it did for certain people. But I think that for me, it was so hard to. I just completely broke.
Lea Michele, Heather Morris, Matthew Morrison, Jayma Mays, Cory Monteith, Kevin McHale, Amber Riley, Samuel Larsen, Damian McGinty, Darren Criss, Mark Salling and Chris Colfer in ‘Glee’ (Adam Rose/Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“I was really in a one-track mind of just doing my job. It was way too much to try to process at a young age,” she said, noting that she still felt “supported” by the cast and crew of the Fox series.
“I’m very grateful for everyone there, whether or not they know it,” Michele continued. “I personally felt a lot of support from everybody in the building helping me to get through. Especially from the crew. The people that would be behind the camera every day— I would be looking at the camera but looking at the person behind it… I was looking at those people like they were holding me up, as well as the people who were on the show.”
With the show going into its fifth season at the time of Monteith’s death on July 13, 2013, Michele noted that the characters had graduated high school. “A lot of people were gone by then, which was hard,” she said.
Meanwhile, Michele continues to stay close with co-stars Darren Criss and Dianna Agron, adding: “There is such a comfort because we all really did go through something that only we will ever understand. So I feel so safe with them and so comfortable. Family forever.”
Created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, Glee ran for six seasons on Fox from 2009 to 2015, following high school show choir coach Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) and his team of talented outsiders as they worked toward their goals of becoming national champions while dealing with the drama of high school by performing covers of hit songs.
Following Monteith’s death, co-star Mark Salling died by suicide in 2018 after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography. Fellow cast member Naya Rivera died in 2020 when she drowned while boating with her son on Lake Piru in Ventura County, California.
