Lea Michele challenged the longstanding rumor that she doesn’t know how to read by reading from a set of notecards.
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While appearing on the Therapuss With Jake Shane podcast, the Glee alum set the record straight about the rumor. She revealed that Ryan Murphy initially told he about the gossip.
“Ryan Murphy called me, and he was like, ‘Have you heard this rumor?'” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘No, what’s going on?’ And the fact that we’re here all these years later.”
Michele jumped out of her chair and reached for the notecards that Shane was holding. “Give me the notes. I’m reading that,” she said. “Jonathan [Groff] is not here to read this to me.”
While reading fan-submitted questions aloud, the actress jokingly asked, “What does this word say?”
She then read several notecards while looking at the camera after each notecard.
The rumor dates back to 2015, when fans filmed a Facebook live video showing “evidence” that Michele could not read. They also said that the actress had “to learn, like, four words” for her role on Ragtime. The fans believed Murphy had helped cover for Michele after she landed TV roles.
Lea Michele Admitted The Rumor Bothers Her Every So Often
When the podcast host asked if the rumor bothered her, Lea Michele admitted the gossip sometimes bothered her.
“It really depends on the day,” she explained. “Sometimes I think it’s crazy that people care enough about me that they would make up something. That someone has so little to do in their life and their day that they would waste it on me is hilarious to me.”
However, Lea then said she gets “so frustrated” by the rumor. “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,” she added. “But yeah, it’s wild.”
Michele pointed out that her longtime friend and former Glee co-star, Jonathan Groff, had a great response to the rumor when he was asked about it. “Jonathan did a podcast, and someone was like, ‘Can Lea read?’ And his response to me was so funny,” she said. “He was like, ‘Do you really think she can’t? What the f— does that say about you?'”