Ryan Murphy Staged Intervention For Cory Monteith In March, Feels Guilty About His Death

by UInterviewJuly 22, 2013, 12:00 amNews >

Ryan Murphy, the co-creator of Glee, is admitting that he feels gulity actor Cory Monteith's drug-overdose death and that he led an intervention for the actor in March.

As somewhat of a father figure to members of the largely young cast, Murphy played a major role in getting Monteith, who'd become a household name during the show's success, into rehab. “We had an incident in March, which has been reported on, where we found out he was using again and staged an intervention in my office with a lot of appropriate people,” Murphy told E! News. “He wanted to continue working and we said, 'That's not an option. No. The TV show doesn't matter, your life matters.' ”

Murphy added, “His last words to me were, ‘I want to get better,’ and I always felt and continue to feel even in his death that he did, that he really wanted to fight it.” The Glee creator admits that he feels a certain amount of guilt in Monteith’s death for not having been able to save him. Yet, he went on to state that both he and Monteith’s surviving girlfriend and Glee costar Lea Michele feel they’d done everything they could.

Michele, as it happens, has been the compass in determining how Glee would be affected by Monteith’s sudden death. “Ultimately the person who made the decision [for Glee to continue] was Lea, who felt that the best thing for the cast and crew was to be together and to get back to work and be together every day and talk about our memories of him.” Murphy also revealed that he would have grief counselors on set for the first couple weeks of filming.

The plan for the musical-comedy series' immediate future is to air two back-to-back Beatles tribute episodes that had been written back in May. They’ll be followed by a tribute episode to Monteith, which will feature the death of his character Finn Hudson. Following the airing of that episode, Murphy has decided that the show will go on hiatus so that a clearer future for the show can be determined.

Michele has blessed all decisions pertaining to the show and the handling of Monteith’s death, according to Murphy. “I've never met any 26-year-old person stronger than Lea,” said Murphy. “She's really been the leader in this situation, which is very unfair in a weird way because this show has always been so complicated about characters merging into personal lives, merging into public identity, so it's just all f**king rough. It's just rough and it sucks and there's no right way to do it.”

Monteith was discoverd dead at his hotel room in downtown Vancouver on July 13. His cause of death was later determined to be the result of a lethal combination of heroin and alcohol. He was 31.

Glee will return for its fifth season on Sept. 26, one week later than had previously been scheduled.

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