Lea Michele discusses ‘eye-opening’ Glee cast member’s bullying claims

Lea Michele’s behaviour on the set of Glee was outed by a host of cast members in 2020. Now, she has finally addressed the claims in a new interview.

US actress Lea Michele has addressed Glee cast’s bullying claims. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Lea Michele has broken her silence three years after she was accused by her Glee co-stars for alleged toxic, bullying behaviour on the set of the hit musical TV show.

The 36-year-old US actress addressed the intense backlash from her former colleagues during a candid conversation withInterview magazine.

While she apologised on Instagram at the time of the criticism in 2020, her post was widely slammed for lacking accountability. Now, she’s set the record straight, Fox News reports.

“I think these past two years have been so important for everybody to just sit back and reflect,” she said. “I did a lot of personal reach-outs.”

Back in 2020, Glee cast member Samantha Ware created a media storm when she famously called out Michele’s on-set behaviour and alleged that she made her time on the show difficult.

Lea Michele was hit with multiple bullying accusations in 2020. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Ware took to Twitter to claim Michele made her first television gig “a living hell,” alleging that she’d told other cast members that if given the opportunity she would have “sh*t in [Ware’s] wig”.

She also alluded to “other traumatic micro-aggressions” from Michele.

Alex Newell, another star of the show, displayed support for Ware’s comments, while cast mate Heather Morris also said that Michele was “unpleasant to work with”.

An actor who co-starred on Broadway with Michele further claimed she was a “nightmare”.

More recently, another Glee alum, Chris Colfer, publicly stated that he wouldn’t be seeing Michele’s Funny Girl Broadway debut last autumn, joking: “I can be triggered at home.”

After Michele took the heat from her colleagues, she got candid about rectifying her relationships with the former cast and noted she found solace along the way.

A long list of Michele’s Glee co-stars came out swinging at the actress. Picture: Miranda Penn Turin/FOX

“At the end of the day, what matters the most is how you make people feel,” she said. “And you have to put aside your feelings. The conversations that I’ve had behind the scenes with some people were incredibly healing and very eye-opening for me.

“I’ve been doing this for a really long time and I’m not going to ever blame anything on the things that I’ve been through in my life. But you also can’t ignore those experiences or deny them. They are a part of the patchwork of my life.”

Michele went on to detail her coping mechanisms amid the drama among her Glee co-stars and how it helped her prepare for her role in the Broadway revival of Funny Girl.

“More than anything, I’m so grateful to have this opportunity to apply the things that I’ve learned over the past 10-plus years in a positive way,” Michele told the media outlet.

Lea Michele is having a career comeback with her Broadway role in Funny Girl. Picture: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM

“What I told myself stepping into Funny Girl was, ‘If I can’t take my role as a leader offstage as important as my role as a leader onstage, then I shouldn’t do this show.’ Because that was always a struggle for me.”

As she continues to move on from the Glee drama, Michele expressed her gratitude for her current stage in life.

“To have this opportunity now at 36 years old as a wife and a mother – to step into this job that comes with so much pressure and a huge amount of responsibility – was a very, very big achievement for me.”

This story originally appeared on Fox News and was reproduced with permission