Over a decade after the 2013 death of her boyfriend Cory Monteith, whom she starred with on the hit show Glee, Lea Micheleopened up about the loss and publicly grieving.
On the new episode of the Therapuss podcast hosted by Jake Shane, Michele spoke about Monteith and his death, saying, “It was so sad [and] it was so depressing,” before noting about the grieving process, “No one handed me a guidebook. It was a fast education on more stuff than I could ever even process.”
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Regarding the quick return to work on Glee, she said, “If we didn’t show up to work, then people wouldn’t have work to go to. That was a lot of pressure for me. So, I had to put my stuff aside so that everybody could continue to work.”
“I just completely broke, like, I was in a really, one-track mind of just doing my job. It was way too much to try to process at such a young age,” Michele said, adding that she felt the experience brought the cast together in some ways, but also, “it really fractured so much.”
Outside of her experience on Glee after Monteith died, Michele revealed that a tour bus used to come in front of her house, saying, “It was the tour of people [who] have died, and after everything happened, this bus would come by…every day I would hear these details, and eerie music would be playing from the tour bus.”
Monteith died of a drug and alcohol overdose at 31 years old, and soon after his passing, Glee worked his character’s death into the series and paid tribute to the actor.
