Lea Michele says Ryan Murphy called to inform her the internet thinks she can’t read

Rumors have swirled for years that Lea Michele can’t read – rumors that Michele has cleared up as baseless on numerous occasions. Now the star is revisiting the moment she first encountered the persistent online myth.

“What was trending online more was ‘Lea Michele can’t read,'” the Funny Girl star shares in an advance clip of the new episode of Jake Shane’s Therapuss podcast, which drops Wednesday evening. Michele revealed it was her former Glee boss, Ryan Murphy, who “called me and was like, ‘Have you heard this rumor?’ And I was like, ‘No, what’s going on!'”

Before Michele can carry on with her next thought, she lunges across the table toward Shane’s notes, seizing the stack of cards while shouting, “Give me those! I’m reading them!”

Lying somewhere between mean-spirited schoolyard rumors, a light-hearted online meme, and a full-blown conspiracy theory, rumbles of Michele’s alleged illiteracy date back at least as far as 2017. That year, One More Thing podcasters Jaye Hunt and Robert Ackerman humorously advanced the theory based on a close reading of Sorry Not Sorry, the memoir released by Michele’s Glee costar Naya Rivera the previous year.

Rivera, who died in 2020 at the age of 33, claimed in Sorry Not Sorry that Michele refused to improvise while shooting scenes for the Fox comedy series. Hunt and Ackerman extrapolated that claim into the theory that it Michele’s illiteracy forced her to memorize her scripts, making improv impossible.

The theory caught fire, setting the meme world ablaze and eight years later proving to still have a little life left in it yet.

Michele has addressed the theory on multiple occasions. In 2018, Michele discussed the theory with Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen and fellow guest Bethenny Frankel, pointing out how improbable it would be for her to have to fully “memorize pages and pages” of Glee scripts every week. “By the way,” she added, “they said that Ryan Murphy would have to read the lines to me. Ryan called me and was like, ‘Do people think I have the time in my life to come do this?'”

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Speaking to the New York Times in 2022, Michele called the theory “sad. It really is. I think often if I were a man, a lot of this wouldn’t be the case.”

Though she’s addressed, debunked, and castigated the rumors, they haven’t fully gone away. So Michele has lately taken to making light of them.

When the New York City-born actress, 38, joined TikTok in the fall of 2022, she captioned her first post, “Calling Jonathan to read me the comments on my first TikTok,” referencing her Spring Awakening costar and longtime friend Jonathan Groff.

The following year, Michele posted another TikTok in reference to her starring role in the Broadway revival of Funny Girl, which Barbra Streisand originated in 1964. Reacting to the upcoming release of Streisand’s memoir Barbra, Michele joked, “265 days to learn to READ!!!!”

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