Relax, Gleeks.
After Glee creator Ryan Murphy's July 13 comments about cast members Lea Michele, Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer graduating and leaving the series ignited a fan frenzy, Murphy admits in a new interview he's trying much harder to "monitor what I say."
Speaking to Deadline.com Thursday, Murphy confirmed the three actors were not fired, and revealed that the real reason he said they wouldn't be back for season 4 was because Murphy was investigating a possible spin-off.
Having an open discussion with the cast — because, as Murphy says, "you can't make people do spin-offs" — Murphy and his colleague, Brad Falchuk, asked for input on the new show and they all expressed interest. "They were involved in the process for three to four months to the point that we were even talking about cities and relocation," Murphy told Deadline.
So the executive producer was especially miffed when Colfer said he found out he was let go via Twitter.
"For any of those actors to say, 'I found out that I was fired off the show from Twitter,' is absolutely 100 percent not true. None of them were fired. It was never about that," Murphy said. "I think what happened is Chris Colfer did an interview and the timing probably was a little bit unfortunate. I think that he was getting a lot of calls with people saying, 'You're fired. You're fired.' And all of them knew they weren't fired, but it was an awful thing to read. And I felt for them. And they couldn't come out and say, 'No, we weren't fired. We're talking about a spin-off.' Because we told them not to."
As a result of the backlash, Murphy and Falchuk have tabled the spin-off idea, at least for the time being. "Some of the actors that we discussed doing spin-offs do not want to do a spin-off. It's hard to do a spin-off on a show where an actor says no," he said. "And if there's no spin-off, then we'll announce that there's not. But as of now, I can tell you I'm not working on it.
"I've learned a lesson from this experience," Murphy admits. "I've learned to really, really monitor what I say. Before I didn't do that. My bad. Stupid."
By Allison Corneau for Us Weekly . For more Channel Surfing, click here.
