In October, Glee star Chris Colfer did not hold back when he was asked about his former costar, Lea Michele.
During an appearance on The Michelle Collins Show, the actor was asked if he planned to go and watch Lea in Funny Girl on Broadway while he was in New York City.
“My day suddenly just got so full,” Chris immediately replied. When asked again, he affirmed: “No, I can be triggered at home.”
The shady comment came two years after the stars of Glee first began to expose what it was like to work with Lea on the musical TV series, which aired between 2009 and 2015.
However, any bad blood between Lea and Chris hasn’t always been so public. In fact, the two appeared to be good friends while Glee was on air, and she was one of his biggest supporters when he won a Golden Globe for his performance in the show back in 2011.
But a clip from Chris’s Best Supporting Actor in a TV Series win recently resurfaced online after a fan noticed something strange about Lea’s reaction when they rewatched his acceptance speech.
“I was just trying to re-enjoy his win fr fr,” they captioned the video as they posted it to TikTok, where they accused Lea of “fake crying when she realized the camera cut to her.”
Sure enough, the Golden Globes camera cut to Lea partway through Chris’s speech — and she was visibly overwhelmed by his achievement.
When she is first shown, Lea is watching her costar with a hand on her chest, but just seconds later she starts to take dramatically deep breaths and puts her hand over her mouth before wiping her eyes.
And after watching the clip, many people agreed with the TikTok’s claim that she was faking her response for the benefit of the cameras.
“The shortness of breath for me 😂,” one person wrote in the comments. Another added: “That girl practices her acting skills every moment she gets 😂.”
“She saw that green light go off and she went to work,” one more claimed. Someone else commented: “The wiping of the tear 😂 💀.”
Others laughed over Lea’s “dramatic breathing,” while one viewer branded the star “a method actor in the wild.”
Another pointed out that her emotional response came after the rest of the live audience laughed at what Chris was saying — meaning that it wasn’t even a particularly emotional moment.
“The fact that he was joking before this it wasnt even something emotional I CANNOT,” they wrote.
One more concluded: “It would be much more respectable to just be genuine. Like why do stuff like this smh.”
The clip resurfaced just one month after Lea was branded a “narcissist” by a Glee crew member in the three-part docuseries The Price of Glee.
She was also recently called out for appearing to move Stranger Things star Sadie Sink out of the way so that she could take center stage during their joint appearance on The Tonight Show.
And both instances follow years of Lea’s former costars making serious allegations about the way that she treated them on set.
In 2020, Samantha Ware accused the star of making her life “a living hell” with a series of “traumatic microaggressions.”
She was publicly supported by Amber Riley and Heather Morris at the time, who said that Lea was “very” unpleasant to work with.
Meanwhile, Naya Rivera claimed that Lea “didn’t like sharing the spotlight” and would pointedly ignore her during their time together on the show.
And Elizabeth Aldrich — who was Lea's understudy for a theater project when they were children — called Lea “absolutely awful” and said that she would “cry every night from the mean and manipulative things she would do.”
Lea herself addressed this string of negative reports about her in a profile for Interview earlier this month, where she admitted that she had privately reached out to people and had “eye-opening” conversations in recent years.
“At the end of the day, what matters the most is how you make people feel,” she explained. “And you have to put aside your feelings. The conversations that I’ve had behind the scenes with some people were incredibly healing and very eye-opening for me.”
Lea had previously told the New York Times that Samantha’s 2020 comments had sparked an “intense time of reflection” for her.
