Lea Michele is weighing on the internet’s long-standing obsession with her literacy skills.
“For everyone who thinks that I can’t f***ing read, I was on the debate team! I mean, I would, like, write speeches,” the Glee star, 38, shared on the Wednesday, May 7, edition of the “Therapuss” podcast hosted by Jake Shane.
Asked if she finds the persistent rumor “hysterical” or whether it annoys her, Michele said her response “depends on the day.”
“Sometimes, I think it’s crazy that people care enough about me that they would make up something,” she said. “That someone has so little to do in their life and their day that they would waste it on me is, like, hilarious to me.”
On the flip side, the Funny Girl Broadway star doesn’t always see the humor in the long-running joke.
“There are moments when I get so f***ing frustrated by it because I’m one of the only women in my whole family to get accepted to college,” Michele explained. “My mother and my mother’s whole family was extremely poor, from the Bronx, not very well educated … my parents moved me from the Bronx to New Jersey to get a good education and to thrive, and I did.”
“My parents and my family are so proud of that. It was really important for my grandmother to see me. And, so, for someone to minimize that, it’s so sad and so frustrating,” she said. “It’s wild. It’s a crazy thing.”
Michele also revealed that Glee creator Ryan Murphy was the first person to alert her to the bizarre rumor. “He was like, ‘Have you heard this rumor?’ and I was like, ‘No, what’s going on?’” she said.
In a bid to prove she can, in fact, read, the actress humorously took possession of Shane’s cue cards and declared, “I’m reading them!”
The good-humored star joked that her reading comprehension skills would still be questioned. “The theories! They’re gonna be like, ‘Jake called her in advance. This doesn’t prove anything. She memorized it. She saw the cards in advance. This proves nothing,’” Michele quipped.
This isn’t the first time Michele has poked fun at this particular rumor. In September 2022, the actress nodded to the conspiracy theory when she first joined TikTok.
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“Calling Jonathan to read me the comments on my first TikTok,” she captioned a video, referring to longtime friend Jonathan Groff.
In February 2023, after original Funny Girl star Barbra Streisand announced she would publish her memoir in the fall of 2023, Michele quipped in a TikTok video, “265 days to learn to READ!!!”
