Lea Michele Finally Speaks About Cory Monteith & ‘Glee’ Farewell To Finn Episode

Robbie Daw | October 9, 2013 7:34 am

Tomorrow night (October 10), Glee will say farewell to Finn Hudson — and the actor who played the football-star-turned-glee-club-hero, Cory Monteith — in the third episode of Season 5, “The Quarterback.” Showrunner Ryan Murphy had previously spoken about how difficult it was for the cast and crew to shoot the episode. But the one person who’s been somewhat quiet since Monteith’s death in July is, understandably, his girlfriend both onscreen and off, Lea Michele.

The actress, who played Rachel Berry opposite Finn for four seasons, finally spoke about Monteith — quite beautifully, actually — as well as tomorrow’s tribute episode.

“I feel like, for me personally, I’ve lost two people: Cory and Finn,” Michele said in an interview with Australia’s TV Week. “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 went on to explain her reasons for sticking around around on Glee, despite the fact that many expected her to depart the show in the wake of Monteith’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.”

TV Week didn’t seem to shy away from asking Michele her thoughts on the way Monteith died. He was found lifeless in a Vancouver hotel room on July 13, and it was ultimately ruled to be death by combined heroin and alcohol toxicity.

“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 said while, the publication noted, 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.”

And, finally, here’s a scrap of info about tomorrow’s tribute episode, directly from Lea:

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! 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.

Catch all of the songs from “The Quarterback” here.

[Via TV Week]

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