Lea Michele is looking back on grieving the death of her boyfriend and Glee costar, Cory Monteith, while still filming the musical show.
“I had a tour bus that would go past my house in West Hollywood and you would hear, ‘Lea Michele [is] Rachel Berry on Glee,’ and then I would hear ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ playing while I’m sitting in my living room,” Michele, 38, said on the Thursday, May 8, episode of the “Therapuss” podcast. “It was the tour of people [who] have died, and after everything happened, this bus would come by.”
Michele’s Berry famously covers Funny Girl’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in multiple episodes of Glee, which aired from 2009 to 2015.
“Here I was, 26 years old,” she recalled. “This tour bus would go back by my house and every day I would hear these details, and eerie music would be playing from the tour bus.”
Monteith died of a heroin and alcohol overdose in July 2013 after a previous battle with addiction. He was 31.
“It was so sad [and] it was so depressing,” Michele recalled to podcast host Jake Shane. “I was 26. No one handed me a guidebook. It was a fast education on more stuff than I could ever even process, but also, 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.”
Michele and Monteith were filming Glee at the time of his death. The Canadian actor’s character, Finn Hudson, was killed off the Fox series during season 5.
“I think it really fractured so much,” Michele added of her relationship with her fellow Glee costars. “I can’t speak for everyone, but I think that maybe in some ways it [brought us closer]. For me, it was so hard.”
She continued, “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.”
According to Michele, she is also “very grateful” for her colleagues on the Ryan Murphy series.
“I personally felt a lot of support from everybody in the building, like, helping me to get through, especially from the crew,” she remembered. “I’d be looking at the camera, but looking at the person behind it [was] our incredible crew members. I was looking at those people like they were holding me up, as well as the people who were on the show.”
Michele, who has frequently honored Monteith’s legacy through the years, eventually found love again with now-husband Zandy Reich, going on to welcome two children.
