Lea Michele opened up about her grieving process 12 years after Cory Monteith’s shocking death during a recent appearance on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast
Michele and Monteith dated both on Glee and offscreen until he suddenly died at the age of 31 from an accidental overdose in July 2013
The actress revealed that a Hollywood tour bus used to drive past her house and discuss the “details” of Monteith’s death, leading her to move to a more secluded area
The loss of Cory Monteith impacted all parts of Lea Michele’s life.
The actress, 38, reflected on the aftermath of her former Glee costar’s shocking 2013 death during a recent appearance on Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast. When Monteith, who was Michele’s real-life and onscreen beau, died from an accidental overdose at the age of 31, she said she struggled to find an escape from the devastation.
Related: Cory Monteith & Lea Michele: Their Love Story
“Life was very different,” she explained. “I mean, I had a tour bus that would go past my house in West Hollywood, and you would hear it. I’d be in the house, it’d be like, Lea Michele, Rachel Berry on Glee.’ And then I would hear ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ playing while I’m sitting in my living room.”
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Cory Monteith and Lea Michele
“It was the tour of people that have died,” Michele then revealed. “And after everything happened, this bus would come by — it was like the ‘Hollywood tragedy to tour bus’ — and here I was, 26 years old, and this tour bus would go by my house. And every day I would hear, ‘These are the details [of Monteith’s death],’ and blah, blah, blah. And eerie music would be playing from the tour bus.”
The experience became “so, so depressing” that Michele ultimately decided to leave the area that previously felt “so safe” to her and move “deep” into a canyon in the Pacific Palisades.
“I was 26, right? No one handed me a guidebook,” she said of her grief process. “It was a fast education on more stuff than I could ever even process.”
Related: Cory Monteith Honored by Lea Michele on the 10th Anniversary of His Death: ‘Miss You Every Day’
Monteith was found dead on July 13, 2013, at Vancouver’s Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel as a result of a mixture of heroin and alcohol. Just one month later, Michele returned to set to film season 5 of Glee, which was a challenge.
“If we didn’t show up for work, then people wouldn’t have work to go to, and that was a lot of pressure for me,” she shared. “So I had to put my stuff aside and just show up so that everybody could continue to work.”
FOX
Lea Michele and Cory Monteith
Related: Lea Michele’s Glee Costars Recall Her ‘Strength’ on Set After Cory Monteith’s Death: ‘Heartbreaking on So Many Levels’
While she looks back now and sees her time on the musical-drama as “something so special to me,” the mom-of-two said that the tragedy didn’t bring the cast closer together. In fact, she felt like “it really fractured so much.”
“I can’t speak for everyone,” she noted. “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. 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 but I’m very grateful for everyone there, whether or not they know it. 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, like I would be looking at the camera, but looking at the person behind it,” she added. “They were holding me up so much.”
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All six seasons of Glee can be streamed on Disney+.
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