Lea Michele Reflects on Grief, Fame, and Hollywood’s Dark Obsession After Cory Monteith’s Death

The Glee star opens up about her painful experience of being targeted by a “Hollywood tragedy” tour following Monteith’s passing, and the emotional toll of mourning in the public eye.

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Lea Michele is opening up about the deeply personal and painful aftermath of losing her Glee co-star and partner Cory Monteith, revealing how her grief became a spectacle in the heart of Hollywood.

In a candid conversation on the Therapuss podcast with Jake Shane, the 38-year-old actress and singer shared the eerie experience of having tour buses drive past her home after Monteith’s death in 2013 — turning her private mourning into part of a public attraction.

“Life was very different,” Michele recalled. “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 stunned. “What? They can do that? They can drive by your house and say to people that’s where you live?” he asked, reflecting the disbelief many listeners likely shared.

But the story didn’t end there.

According to Michele, things took a darker turn after Monteith died of an overdose in a Vancouver hotel room at the age of 31. The couple had publicly confirmed their relationship about a year and a half prior.

“There was also a tour bus that used to drive by my house… It was the tour of people who have died,” she explained. “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.'”

To make matters worse, Michele said the tour buses often played “eerie music” as they passed her residence, as if her grief were part of a horror attraction. “And there I was, just at home.”

The emotional toll eventually became too much. Michele said she decided to leave the house behind and seek refuge far from the spotlight — literally.

“I bought a house so high up, in a canyon far, far, far deep in Pacific Palisades,” she shared. “Because I was like, I need to get out of West Hollywood.”

Beyond the physical move, Michele also touched on the strain Monteith’s death placed on her relationships with her Glee castmates. She described feeling “fractured” from them during that time and noted the lack of support and guidance she had as she navigated grief in the public eye.

“I was 26 and no one handed me a guidebook,” she said. Just a month after Monteith’s death, Michele returned to set and 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.”

The tragedy didn’t just mark a turning point for Michele, but for the Glee production itself. In 2022, Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy publicly expressed regret for pushing forward with the show so soon after Monteith’s death.

“If I had to do it again, we would’ve stopped for a very long time and probably not come back,” Murphy said. “I would be like, ‘That’s the end’… Because you can’t really recover from something like that.”

Michele’s honest reflection serves as a sobering reminder of how public figures often face private grief under relentless scrutiny — and how fame, for all its glitz, sometimes comes with deeply human costs.