‘Glee’ Star Matthew Morrison Explains Why He Wanted To Leave The Hit Show

Glee‘s Matthew Morrison had his fill and wanted out. Then tragedy struck.

In an interview with the And That’s What You REALLY Missed podcast, Morrison 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 played teacher Will Schuester on the series and wanted 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.”k

However, Morrison’s co-star, Cory Monteith, died at age 31 in 2013, changing plans. “Cory passed, and then they said they couldn’t do it,” Morrison said. “Because you can’t have the two main guys on the show [leave]. So yeah, it was an interesting time.”

Morrison says, “Obviously I understood, I was like ‘yeah, I get it.’ 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 was upset at first at changes that de-emphasized him. “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.”