Glee star, Lea Michele, opened up for the first time on the death of her onscreen and real life boyfriend, Cory Monteith at a press conference yesterday with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
“I feel like, for me personally, I’ve lost two people: Cory and Finn,” reports TV WEEK Australia.
Glee will air a special memorial episode on Thursday that serves to both say goodbye to Finn Hudson and memorialize the late actor, who died of an overdose of heroin and alcohol in a Vancouver hotel room on July 13.
On the decision to take part in a memorial episode, Lea shared, “We had a beautiful memorial for Cory in the auditorium and some of the cast members sang and people spoke about him. It only felt right that we would do the same thing for Finn, so I felt it was very therapeutic.”
Lea explained why she didn’t quit Glee after Cory’s death. “Everyone is asking: ‘Is it hard to do this? Is it hard to be back at work?’, but the truth is it’s no harder at work than it is in life so we might as well all be together as a family supporting each other to get through this together.”
Lea shared a funny story about Cory, who was always a prankster on set. “One day I came home and Cory was there with this plaque from the set that we always had in the glee club and I said, ‘What’s this doing here?’ and he said, ‘I took it! He said, ‘This summer we are going to take it all over everywhere we go and take pictures of us with this plaque!’ and that’s what we did!
In the episode, which takes place a few weeks after Finn’s death, Rachel presents the Glee club with a plaque of Finn.
“Then I got the script and thought it was so unbelievable that they chose to do that in the episode. So, for me, there are a lot of little things that are so special, everything means a lot to me.”
When asked what she’d like fans to remember about Cory, Lea responded, “I really woke up every single day feeling like I was being in some sort of spell or something, that I was lucky enough to have him in my life. I feel like what happened with Cory (the cause of his death) was this big,” she says, holding her fingers together to reflect a miniscule amount, “in the scheme of who he was and his life.
“There was no greater man than Cory, so for the time we spent together I consider myself very lucky.”
In an earlier interview, Glee co-creator, Ryan Murphy, opened up about the memorial episode.
“She does have a song,” Ryan said (Lea is singing Bob Dylan’s “To Make You Feel My Love”) “It was a very personal one for her and Cory.
“She’s ultimately the person who approved and chose that song. She wanted to do something personal. I don’t think she’ll ever share why she chose that song. It was very sad; everybody was wrecked. It was really hard.”
“The episode is about how you mourn people and how lives can make a difference,” Ryan explained, “Particularly with the Rachel character, she struggles with it [the loss] all season. It’s not just done, buried and goodbye.”
“She was actually deeply in it [on set] – her story kicks in during the last half,” he said. “It was very brave of her to do, because there were some cast members, who we won’t name, who didn’t want to do a grief episode, didn’t want to do a memorial episode. So, Lea really put herself in the bottom of the heap and soldiered on.”
Read more at TV Week Australia HERE and HERE.
The episode, titled “The Quarterback” airs on FOX Thursday October 10 at 9 pm. Check out FULL songs from the episode HERE. And below, check out these heart wrenching sound bites from the show. Sue (Jane Lynch), Will (Matt Morrison), Santana (Naya Rivera), Kurt (Chris Colfer) and Rachel all mourn Finn in their own particular way.
