‘Glee’ star Lea Michele says her house became tourist attraction after Cory Monteith’s death

Glee star Lea Michele is reflecting on life in the spotlight and the challenges of grieving her former castmate and partner Cory Monteith after his death in 2013.

During a wide-ranging converstaion on the Therapuss podcast with host Jake Shane, the actress said that her fame from starring on the hit Fox series, which ran from 2009 to 2015, often followed her home.

“Life was very different,” said Michele, 38. “I mean, I had a tour bus that would go past my house in West Hollywood, and you would hear it. I’d be in the house, and it’d be like, ‘Lea Michele, Rachel Berry on Glee.’ And then I would hear ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ playing while I’m sitting in my living room.”

Shane was taken aback: “What? They can do that? They can drive by your house and say to people that’s where you live?”

Michele confirmed the story and said it took an even darker turn after Monteith’s fatal overdose in a Vancouver hotel room at 31. Michele and Monteith had starred on four seasons of Glee together and went public with their romantic relationship a year and a half before his death.

“There was also a tour bus that used to drive by my house… It was the tour of people who have died,” Michele said on the podcast. “And after everything happened, this bus would come by — it was, you know, a Hollywood tragedy tour bus. And here, I was 26 years old, and this tour bus would pass by my house and every day I would hear, ‘These are the details and blah blah blah.'”

In addition to tour guides recounting the story of Monteith’s death, Michele said that “eerie music would be playing from the tour bus and there I was, just at home.”

Michele eventually left the house behind. “I bought a house so high up, in a canyon far, far, far deep in Pacific Palisades,” she said, “because I was like, I need to get out of West Hollywood.”

The conversation also saw Michele discuss how Monteith’s loss “fractured” her relationship with her Glee castmates.

“I was 26 and no one handed me a guidebook,” she said, noting that when she returned to the set just a month after Moteith’s death, she threw herself into work. “I was really in a one-track mind of just doing my job. It was way too much to try to process at a young age.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy has previously expressed some regret for the decision to continue the show so soon after the loss. “If I had to do it again, we would’ve stopped for a very long time and probably not come back,” he said in 2022. “I would be like, ‘That’s the end’ … Because you can’t really recover from something like that.”

Watch Michele’s full conversation with Shane above.