In 2008, when Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuck and Ian Brennan pitched and ultimately created a teen drama centred round present tunes, they could not have forseen the cultural precipice they teetered over.
Glee premiered in 2009 to an viewers of younger adults and teenagers who wouldn’t solely develop a love for Patti Lupone and Barbara Streisand, however propel the solid into world fame.
Along with this fame got here a string of controversies, drama, in-fighting and deaths. It is that this double-edged phenomenon and fan fascination that has saved Glee on the forefront of popular culture to at the present time – and a brand new documentary, The Price of Glee, is simply furthering that.
The documentary, which solid and crew have distanced themselves from, aired within the US final night time, with a quantity of reveals revolving round solid feuds and the unhappy deaths of solid members Cory Monteith, Mark Salling and Naya Rivera. Read on for the 5 biggest bombshells.
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Cast had been ‘pressured’ to renew filming after Monteith’s death
It has lengthy been reported the choice to renew filming mere weeks after the death of Monteith in 2013 was made by fellow solid lead, and Monteith’s fiancé, Lea Michele.
“Ultimately, the person who made the decision was Lea, who felt that the best thing for the cast and crew was to be together and to get back to work and be together every day and talk about our memories of him,” Ryan Murphy instructed People on the time.
“So we decided to do that with Lea’s blessing and we’re going to go back to work and have grief counsellors on the set for two weeks because people are really hurting.”
However, in response to the documentary, not everybody thought this was a good suggestion.
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“It was only a couple of weeks. All of the actors just had to pull themselves together and get back to work,” Naya Rivera’s stand-in Jodie Tanaka mentioned.
“Everyone was just kind of forced to.”
“It probably would’ve been better to just, you know, end the show. But there’s no possible way they were going to do that. The show was like a giant, massive money machine,” mentioned Stephen Kramer Glickman.
Years later, Murphy himself additionally admitted that this may occasionally have been an error in judgement: “Now, if this had happened, I would be like, ‘That’s the end’. Because you can’t really recover from something like that.”
Cory Monteith was ‘troubled’
Whilst none of the Glee solid members seem on this documentary, a number of individuals in proximity to them do, including Monteith’s ex-roommate Justin Neill.
Neil mentioned the actor, who performed Finn Hudson, as soon as revealed he thought his drug and alcohol use would result in an premature death.
“I remember him telling me once, ‘I thought I was gonna die young’. Like 18 or something like that,” Neill recalled.
Monteith was 31 when he was found lifeless in a lodge room in Vancouver after an unintentional overdose in 2013.
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Neill additionally alleges Monteith had a stalker who was so persistent he was pressured to maneuver.
“I was super emotional. We were like family,” Neill mentioned within the documentary.
In reality, the stalking and fan bombardment of the solid obtained so intense, one crew member claims they had been pressured to construct tunnels between their trailers and filming areas for the younger stars so they might journey safely from place to position.
Naya Rivera’s dad known as her moments earlier than her death
Rivera’s father additionally appeared within the documentary and revealed he spoke to the actress moments earlier than she drowned at Lake Piru, California in 2020.
“I get a sinking feeling ’cause we’ve been boating forever. I was FaceTiming with her trying to talk her through the pitfalls of trying to anchor your boat,” George mentioned.
“First of all, I said, ‘Naya, you’re on a pontoon boat, that’s not a boat … why are you on a pontoon boat?’ I said, ‘Do not jump off that effin’ boat. If you’ve got an anchor, you can anchor it, but do you know how to anchor it?’
“We went via a pair iterations like that, and then the FaceTime name hung up and that was the final time I talked to her.”
Rivera, who played Santana Lopez, was reported missing when she failed to return her boat at Lake Piru. When authorities found the boat on the water, the only person on board was her son, Josey. It was revealed that in her final moments, Rivera mustered the energy to save her son but was not able to save herself.
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The ‘Glee curse’ affected the crew as well as the cast
When Monteith, Rivera and co-star Mark Salling died within seven years of one another, folklore of a ‘Glee curse’ began to emerge.
While these deaths were highly publicised, The Price of Glee reveals a number of crew also died behind-the-scenes.
These include assistant director Jim Fuller, who died of a heart attack; production assistant Nancy Motes, who died by suicide; and Matthew Morrison’s stand-in Mark Watson, who apparently died in a car fire.
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An on-set rigging gaffer J.A. Byerly sensationally concluded he partly blames Glee for the suicide of his brother, who worked on the show’s sets.
He alleges his brother was run down by the pressure to keep up with the set piece demands of Glee’s musical numbers, which became increasingly over-the-top in the later seasons to keep the show’s declining viewership invested.
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The cast competed for followers
Hair department head and Monteith’s friend Dugg Kirkpatrick alleges the young stars were in competition with each other over who had the most social media followers.
“I’d usually see the actors gathered, speaking about how many individuals they’d acquired as followers,” Kirkpatrick recalled.
“And there was a contest. In the start, after they needed to tweet every single day, it was Lea that actually had the numbers.”
While The Price of Glee unloaded a number of bombshells and revelations, members of the cast have been less than impressed with the production.
Kevin McHale, who played Artie Abrams, likened the documentary to trash, and in December told a publication that he and his castmates had “nothing to do with it.”
Similarly, Chord Overstreet, who played Sam Evans, called it “bulls–t” during an appearance on Elvis Duran’s radio show.
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