Lea Michele is going to lengths to put a longstanding rumor about her to rest once and for all.
For years, Michele has been the subject of a running-joke-slash-conspiracy-theory that she can’t read or write. The topic appears to have originated sometime around 2015 when it trended on social media, and has dogged the “Glee” actor and singer in the decade since then.
Appearing on the “Therapuss” podcast Thursday, Michele took matters into her own hands.
“Give me the notes ― I’m reading that,” she said as she grabbed host Jake Shane’s notecards and began reading some of the fan-submitted questions aloud. “Jonathan [Groff] is not here to read me this shit!”
Though Shane clarified that the rumors are “so camp” and “so out of love from the gay community at this point,” Michele said her opinion of the rumors “depends on the day.”
“Sometimes I think it’s crazy that people care enough about me that they would make up something,” she explained. “That someone has so little to do in their life and their day that they would waste it on me is hilarious to me.”
Watch Lea Michele’s “Therapuss” interview below. Her comments on the rumor she can’t read or write begin around the 1:06:00 mark.
At other times, however, Michele isn’t laughing.
“I’m one of the only women in my whole family to get accepted to college,” she said. “My mother and my mother’s whole family was extremely poor, from the Bronx, not very well educated and my parents moved me from the Bronx to New Jersey to get a good education and to thrive, and I did. And my parents and my family are so proud of that. It really was so important for my grandmother to see me, and for someone to minimize that, it’s so sad and so frustrating. But yeah, it’s wild.”
She also praised her longtime pal Groff, with whom she co-starred in “Glee” and “Spring Awakening,” who had a particularly blunt response when asked about the rumor in a recent interview.
“Jonathan did a podcast and someone was like, ‘Can Lea read?’ And his response to me was so funny,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Do you really think she can’t? What the fuck does that say about you?’”
Michele has responded to the rumors on more than one occasion over the years, most notably in 2022 with a quirky TikTok video.
“I went to ‘Glee’ every single day; I knew my lines every single day,” she told The New York Times later that year. “And then there’s a rumor online that I can’t read or write? It’s sad. It really is. I think often if I were a man, a lot of this wouldn’t be the case.”
Michele’s interview comes as she is returning to the stage for the first time since she and husband Zandy Reich welcomed their second child, daughter Emery, in August of last year.
She kicked off a spring and summer concert tour Monday in Durham, North Carolina, with additional performances slated for Nashville, Tennessee, and Orlando, Florida, among other cities.
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