Weighing in? Abigail Breslin and more stars subtly addressed drama surrounding Lea Michele after Glee alum Samantha Maria Ware accused the actress of making the show a “living hell.”
Ware, 28, slammed the former Broadway star, 33, for tweeting about the death of George Floyd despite an alleged history of creating a toxic work environment for her fellow actors on the FOX musical drama. The What/If actress claimed that she experienced enough “traumatic microaggressions” from Michele, who had just shown her support for the Black Lives Matter movement, to make her “question a career in Hollywood.”
Later that day, Breslin, 24, was caught “liking” a handful of tweets about the Glee backlash. “not everyone agreeing that something felt off about Lea Michele… where have y’all been i’ve BEEN saying this FOR YEARS??? i thought i was alone,” one Twitter user wrote. Another tweet in Breslin’s list of “liked” posts simply showed a photo of the series’ slogan, “And that’s what you missed on Glee.”
The Little Miss Sunshine star worked alongside Michele on Ryan Murphy‘s Scream Queens, which aired on FOX for two seasons between 2015 and 2016. One year after Scream Queens came to an end, the Emmy nominee went on to star in The Mayor on ABC. Following Ware’s accusations, actors Bernard D. Jones and Marcel Spears began to subtly add their two cents.
Spears “liked” a number of replies to Ware’s initial post, one of which claimed fans should have listened to Naya Rivera, who called Michele out in her 2016 memoir, Sorry Not Sorry: Dreams, Mistakes and Growing Up.
“One of the Glee writers once said that Lea and I were like two sides of the same battery and that about sums us up. We are both strong willed and competitive — not just with each other but with everyone — and that’s not a good mixture,” Rivera, 33, wrote at the time. “I think Rachel — erm, I mean Lea — didn’t like sharing the spotlight. … If I’d complained about anyone or anything, she’d assumed I was bitching about her. Soon, she started to ignore me, and eventually it got to the point where she didn’t say a word to me for all of season 6.”
Michele addressed Ware’s comments in a lengthy statement shared to Instagram on Wednesday, June 3. “One of the most important lessons of the last few weeks is that we need to take the time to listen and learn about other people’s perspectives and any role we have played or anything we can do to help address the injustices that they face,” she wrote. “We all can grow and change and I have definitely used these past several months to reflect on my own shortcomings. I am a couple of months from becoming a mother and I know I need to keep working to better myself and take responsibility for my actions, so that I can be a real role model for my child and so I can pass along my lessons and mistakes, so that they can learn from me. I listened to these criticisms and I am learning and while I am very sorry, I will be better in the future from this experience.”
Scroll down to see how more of Michele’s former costars reacted to the Glee drama.
