“Glee” star Matthew Morrison was desperate to exit “Glee” before the show suffered the loss of one of its stars in 2013.
But when co-star and friend Cory Monteith died that same year — Morrison’s decision to leave the cursed Fox musical dramedy was shot down by producers.
On a recent episode of the “And That’s What You REALLY Missed” podcast, hosted by “Glee” alums Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin McHale, the Broadway actor, 45, got candid about feeling miserable on the show.
“I actually was trying to get off the show,” Morrison — who played teacher Will Schuester who helmed the school’s glee club — recalled. “In Season 5, I asked to be off the show, just ‘cause like, I’m no longer being used in the way I wanted to.”
The “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” actor noted that he wanted to pursue other projects such as film.
He continued: “No disrespect to the show. We were at a high, I was like, ‘Maybe if I get off the show, I could go do something else, go do a movie,’ and they agreed to let me off the show.”
While showrunners were at first fine with letting Morrison off the hook, things changed when Monteith passed away.
The “Monte Carlo” star — who played football player Finn Hudson — died in July 2013 at the age of 31 due to a combination of drug and alcohol toxicity. Season 5 of “Glee” aired that same year and even included a tribute episode to Monteith called “The Quarterback.”
“Cory passed, and then they said they couldn’t do it,” Morrison said. “Because you can’t have the two main guys on the show [leave]. So yeah, it was an interesting time.”
However, the “Hairspray” star “understood” the producers’ decision to keep him on the air.
“I was like ‘Yeah, I get it,’” he said. “You know, trying to reconcile my own wants and selfish needs with the grief of losing an amazing friend, you know, there’s a lot of just mixed emotions. But I’m a professional, I showed up, I did my job. And there was a good pay increase, so that worked too.”
Morrison also admitted that he felt that because his character’s storylines were constantly changing, he “took it personally” that his performance was “bad.”
But the shift in roles was due to “Glee” becoming more about the student characters rather than the teachers.
“I [looked] at the demographic of what the show ended up being, you know, it’s like, they don’t wanna see Mr. Schuester, they wanna see all the kids. So that made sense to me,” he said.
“Glee” creator Ryan Murphy revealed on “And That’s What You REALLY Missed” back in November 2022 that he felt he should have ended the show when Monteith passed.
“Glee” aired on Fox from 2009 until 2015 for six seasons. “If I had to do it again, we would’ve stopped for a very long time and probably not come back,” the “American Horror Story” producer, 58, sighed at the time.
“I would be like, ‘that’s the end’ … Because you can’t really recover from something like that,” he said. “It wasn’t, like, a normal death where someone is sick, and you can see them. It happened so quickly with no warning.”
“It’s an episode I was able to watch once, and I never looked at it again,” Murphy said about the special “The Quarterback” episode.
