14 DAY TRIAL // For the first time since Cory Monteith’s death in July this year, his real-life girlfriend and co-star on the hit Fox series “Glee,” Lea Michele, is speaking out about what it was like to lose him, in an interview with TV Week Australia.
This comes right before tonight’s much anticipated memorial episode on “Glee,” “The Quarterback,” in which the cast says goodbye to Finn, Monteith’s very popular character.
“I feel like, for me personally, I've lost two people: Cory and Finn. 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 says of the episode.
She admits she’s often asked if she considered leaving “Glee” after Cory’s death because it would bring too many painful memories, but she says trying to escape from them would be useless.
“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,” she says.
She’s dealing with the pain by thinking of how lucky she was to have Cory in her life, even if only for such a brief time. He was 31 when he died, of a drug and alcohol overdose, all alone in a hotel room.
“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 [regarding the cause of his death] was this big [she holds her fingers out to reflect a small amount] in the scheme of who he was and his life,” Lea says.
“There was no greater man than Cory, so for the time we spent together I consider myself very lucky,” the star adds.