Matthew Morrison reveals he planned to leave “Glee” before Cory Monteith died

Morrison said he asked to leave the series because he was "no longer being used in the way I wanted to.”

Matthew Morrison wasn’t filled with glee on the set of his biggest project.

In an interview with the And That's What You REALLY Missed podcast, the actor revealed that he was so unhappy on the set of Glee that he planned to exit the show. “I actually was trying to get off the show,” Morrison said. 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.”

Morrison, who played the teacher Will Schuester on the series, said that he had hoped to capitalize off of Glee’s success to take on new projects. “No disrespect to the show,” he said. “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.”

However, tragedy struck when Morrison’s costar Cory Monteith, who played Finn Hudson, died at age 31 in 2013. The producers were forced to alter their plans for the show as a result. "Cory passed, and then they said they couldn’t do it,” Morrison explained. “Because you can’t have the two main guys on the show [leave]. So yeah, it was an interesting time.”

Morrison reflected on his complex feelings after Monteith’s death. “Obviously I understood, I was like ‘yeah, I get it,’” he said about being asked to stay on Glee. “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.”

The actor said that he originally thought that his character’s shifting role on the series was a reflection of his failure as a performer, but he later realized that the change occurred because the show’s teen audience wanted Glee to focus on students more than their teachers. “I think I took it personally, like I was bad, and that’s why my storyline kinda went,” he said. “But then I look 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.”

Listen to the full And That's What You REALLY Missed episode above.

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