Heather Morris, hired to teach Glee a Beyoncé routine and kept for the jokes

Heather Morris

Photo: Heather_Morris_PaleyFest_11a.jpg: Jennifer Tse from Los Angeles, CA derivative work: Tabercil (talk) / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 1, 1987 Thousand Oaks, California, United States
Occupation	Actress and dancer
Known for	Ice Age: Continental Drift, Bedtime Stories, Spring Breakers
Awards	SAG Award (shared)

Heather Morris was brought onto Glee to teach a dance, not to act in it. The choreographer Zach Woodlee needed someone who knew Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” routine well enough to drill it into the cast, and Morris had performed it behind Beyoncé on live television. The show also happened to be short one cheerleader. She took the second job too, and it became Brittany S. Pierce, a Cheerio in the back row with almost nothing to say who ended up saying the oddest, funniest things in the series. With Disney+ and Hulu now reviving Glee, Morris has announced, in Brittany’s voice, that the character is “alive and well… And back for more.”

Morris is a dancer who turned out to have perfect comic timing, and the industry has rarely known which of those two things to hire. She grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, training from early childhood in jazz, tap and contemporary dance, and lost her father to cancer while she was still in her early teens. After Desert Mountain High School and a single year at Arizona State University, she left for Los Angeles to dance for a living.

The first attempt stalled in public: on the second season of So You Think You Can Dance, in 2006, she survived Vegas Week and then missed the final 20 on a 3–2 vote of the judges. The work came anyway. Morris joined Beyoncé’s backing dancers on The Beyoncé Experience tour in 2007, then stayed for the “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” television run that took in the American Music Awards and Saturday Night Live, and she danced behind Beyoncé and Tina Turner at the 50th Grammy Awards. A small part in the cheerleading comedy Fired Up! introduced her to Woodlee, who began calling her for the shows he choreographed, among them Eli Stone, Swingtown and the Adam Sandler film Bedtime Stories.

Glee barely noticed her at first. Brittany was scenery, a third ponytail next to Quinn and Santana, until the writers found that Morris could deliver a nonsensical line with complete sincerity. Jarrett Wieselman of the New York Post called her one of the funniest second bananas on television. By the second season she was a series regular, the centre of the Britney Spears tribute episode “Britney/Brittany” and the singer of her own “I’m a Slave 4 U”. She also co-wrote the Funny or Die parody Nuthin’ But a Glee Thang with Ashley Lendzion and Riki Lindhome, and shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild Award for comedy ensemble in 2010.

The part of Brittany that lasted longest began almost as a gag. The pairing with Naya Rivera’s Santana, which fans named “Brittana”, was treated as a running joke before the show took it seriously, and it ended with the two characters marrying in the final season. Morris and Rivera were close friends off set. When Rivera went missing at Lake Piru in July 2020, Morris joined the search team alongside Rivera’s family. A month later she told fans in a video that both actresses had always known how important that onscreen relationship was to the people watching it, and that she had been writing letters to her friend.

The harder story is what came after Brittany. In June 2013 it was reported that Morris would not be a regular in the fifth season; she came back for the 100th episode, the season finale and five episodes of the last season, including the series finale. Her screen work since has split oddly. Harmony Korine cast her as Bess in Spring Breakers, and she voiced a character in Ice Age: Continental Drift, but a long stretch of her filmography is made up of television thrillers such as Most Likely to Die, Pretty Little Stalker and Fatal Fandom — parts that ask for a face and use little of the timing Glee built a character around.

Her dance training, meanwhile, has worked against her as often as for her. When Dancing with the Stars cast her for its 24th season in 2017, the announcement drew complaints that a professional dancer had an unfair head start; the producers answered that she had no ballroom or partnering experience. She danced several weeks with Alan Bersten while her partner, Maksim Chmerkovskiy, recovered from a calf injury, and in the sixth week she earned the season’s first perfect score, topped the leaderboard and was voted out anyway as the studio audience booed. Five years later, on the British version of The Masked Dancer, nobody could see who she was. Dancing as “Scissors”, she went unguessed for the whole series and won the final on October 22, 2022, ahead of Adam Garcia and Bruno Tonioli.

The recent work is smaller and closer to the comedy. She joined the second season of CBS’s So Help Me Todd in 2024 in a recurring role as Judy Maxon, who works at a gift shop in the same building as the law firm and becomes Todd’s love interest, and she appeared that year in Hannah Pearl Utt’s Cora Bora with Megan Stalter. She is also in the cast of Ugly Cry, Emily Robinson’s horror debut about an actor whose crying on camera costs her a dream role, alongside Robinson, Robin Tunney and Ryan Simpkins; it premiered at South by Southwest on March 12, 2026, and Obscured Releasing bought the distribution rights in July.

Away from work, Morris, who was born in Thousand Oaks, California, on February 1, 1987, married Taylor Hubbell on May 16, 2015. They went to the same Arizona high school without knowing each other, and started dating after he sent her a message on Myspace once she had moved to Los Angeles. They have two sons, Elijah, born in 2013, and Owen, born in 2016. In a 2011 interview with Fitness magazine she put the order of things plainly: if acting ever got in the way of that relationship, she said, she would stop doing it.

The revival is the closest thing yet to a sequel for the career Glee handed her. Variety reported on October 21, 2026, that the new series was officially set at Disney+ and Hulu, and Deadline reported that Morris and Chord Overstreet were in talks to return. Morris did not wait for a press release. Her Instagram caption said that Brittany “was in fact lost in the sewers for all these years” and was now “back for more #Glee”. No premiere date has been announced. When Brittany does come back, it will be the first time she walks into the choir room without Santana, and the new show will have to decide what that means for a character whose best scenes were written for two.

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