"And then two days later, he died." Everything we learned from Ryan Murphy's tell-all Glee interview.

Glee, the popular musical-singing-teenage-romance-comedy show of the mid-2010s, had an absolute grip on the world for the years it aired.

However, with a few years' distance and some telling investigative TikToks, we've come to realise the show was odd at best, and at worst, kind of problematic.

Two of the show's stars, Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin McHale, who starred on the show respectively as Tina Cohen-Chang and Artie Abrams, have since started a podcast called And That's What You REALLY Missed, where they've been exploring the show from a distanced lens.

They recently interviewed the show's creator, Ryan Murphy, on a two-part episode. Here's everything we learned about Glee from the creator himself.

Jenna Ushkowitz, Kevin McHale and Naya Rivera. Image: Getty.

Justin Timberlake was intended for the lead role.

The original concept for Glee had a lot more star power behind it, with Murphy admitting he wanted Justin Timberlake to star as Mr Will Schuester, the driving force behind New Directions. 

“I don’t even think Justin Timberlake knows this, but there was like a one-week window in talking to his people where I thought maybe he was interested, but maybe that meant interested in having a script dropped off at his front door,” Murphy said on the show.

“That was our idea for Mr Schue, Justin Timberlake,” he explained.

“Then it was very quickly like, ‘Justin is booked for tours through to 2013’. So then it was like, no Justin Timberlake.”

Although they couldn’t nab the triple threat for their leading role, Glee saw plenty of star power over the years, with many celebrities coming forward and offering to guest star. We saw the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Kristin Chenoweth, Britney Spears, Kate Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Idina Menzel, Ricky Martin, and Neil Patrick Harris all made guest appearances on the show.

Apparently, Murphy also had offers from Jennifer Lopez, Anne Hathaway, and Javier Bardem, and almost secured Whitney Houston for a guest-starring role, which eventually went to Eve Jeffers.

Rachel Berry was inspired by her actress, Lea Michele.

While the guest appearances on Glee were always exciting, we can’t take away from the absolute talent of its regulars, who gave amazing performances every week. Speaking to McHale and Ushkovitz, Murphy said that a lot of Rachel Berry’s iconic character was inspired by the actress herself, Lea Michele.

He first met her while working on Pretty/Handsome with her best friend, Jonathan Groff, where she told him she was struggling to get auditions.

“That was also a period of time where the ideal look was people who were on The CW shows, and I remember Lea saying like ‘I can’t even get an audition on a goddamn CW show. Like it’s really going to be hard for me’,” Murphy recalled.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, she would be a really good Rachel’.”

He then went on to directly help her with the audition process, directly influencing the casting decision. While this is a bit of a surprise, we’re certain not a single soul could have played the role of Rachel... on set bullying claims aside.

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Cory Monteith's death rocked the cast and crew.

Murphy also spoke at length about his friendship with Cory Monteith, who played Finn, Glee’s teenage male lead. Monteith died of a drug overdose in 2013, but prior to this, Murphy and other cast members had staged an intervention for the actor.

“I helped him in his intervention,” Murphy shared.

“He seemed to have gotten through it in a good way. Then I went off to make The Normal Heart, and I was always talking to him every day. And he came to the set of The Normal Heart to be with me, and he was like my child,” he continued.

“I remember thinking… ‘thank God he made it. Thank God, he’s going to be okay’. He came to Fire Island, and he spent time with me, and I remember thinking, like, against all odds, he’s going to be okay.

“And then two days later, three days later, he died,” Murphy said. “It happened so quickly with no warning.”

Ryan Murphy wishes the show had ended with Monteith's death.

Murphy also admitted that he regrets continuing the show after Monteith died. Although his decision to continue culminated in a stunning tribute to Monteith, he shared that if the same thing were to happen today, he would have ended the show instead.

“I remember after a lot of conversations from a lot of people weighing in, we made the decision to keep it going and if you’re going to keep it going and keep these jobs going, how do you address what happened, because the male lead of the show died, so what do you do?” he asked rhetorically.

“Do you just pretend that it didn’t happen? You can’t do that. Did he die off camera? That doesn’t feel right to me. And I think with a lot of conversations, we decided to pay tribute to him,” Murphy continued.

“If I had to do it again, we would’ve stopped for a very long time and probably not come back."

Cory Monteith with Lea Michele and Ryan Murphy. Image: Glee.

The show won't be rebooted.

In the same vein, Murphy has confirmed there won’t be a Glee reboot. Given the amount of tragedy among the cast, he feels it would be ‘disrespectful’.

In the years since the show ended, two other cast members have passed away. 

Mark Salling, who played Noah Puckerman on the show, took his own life in 2018. He had been awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography a year earlier.

Naya Rivera, who played Santana Lopez in the series, accidentally drowned on a boating trip in 2020, with her young son being found alone on the boat the pair had rented. 

“We just have such a young cast, to lose so many people, it feels much bigger and more tragic because it’s these people that haven’t lived out their time,” Ushkowitz said on the podcast.

“To be blunt, I think that’s why none of us have wanted to do anything else with the show, because [it’s] out of respect for people who have passed.”

However, Murphy is open to a new spin on the franchise.

“Should we do a reboot of it in some way? Should we do a Broadway musical of it in some way? It’s sort of like an interesting legacy that I’m interested in doing in a positive way after pausing for a while,” he said.

“I just love what it says and what it did and there will never be, in my life, another Glee, anything close to it in terms of me feeling so close to it and the feeling that I had while making it, which was pure love.”

Feature Image: Getty.