Lea Michele heads back to Glee, the show that made her and nearly unmade her

Lea Michele

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 29, 1986 The Bronx, New York, United States
Occupation	Actress and singer
Known for	New Year's Eve, Glee: The Concert Movie, Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
Awards	SAG Award (shared) · Satellite Award · People's Choice

The choir room at McKinley High is being rebuilt, and the first person reported to be walking back into it is the actress whose conduct in that room became, long after the cameras stopped, a public indictment from her own castmates. Lea Michele is returning as Rachel Berry in the Glee reboot ordered by Disney+ and Hulu, according to Variety, which confirmed the casting with multiple sources while representatives for Michele and for creator Ryan Murphy declined to comment. An odd homecoming. Rachel was the girl who wanted Broadway more than she wanted to be liked; Michele has spent the past few years proving, on actual Broadway stages, that the first half of that sentence was never her problem.

She was Lea Michele Sarfati first, born in the Bronx, the only child of Edith, an Italian American nurse, and Mark Sarfati, a real estate agent and former deli owner whose Sephardic Jewish family came from Thessaloniki. When she was four the family moved to Tenafly, New Jersey. The surname went at her first audition. She had been teased about its pronunciation, so she gave her middle name instead and never took it back. That audition, for young Cosette in Les Misérables, was supposed to be a friend’s; she tagged along, sang “Angel of Music” because it was the only show tune she knew, and walked out with the part.

She made her Broadway debut in 1995, at eight. Ragtime came next, first in Toronto and then in New York, and a revival of Fiddler on the Roof after that. Offered a place at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she chose to keep working, and the bet paid off in Spring Awakening, the Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater rock musical in which she carried Wendla Bergmann from early workshops to the Broadway opening in December 2006, opposite Jonathan Groff and under director Michael Mayer. It brought her a Drama Desk nomination.

Ryan Murphy wrote Rachel Berry with her in mind. Glee ran for six seasons on Fox, from 2009 to 2015, and Michele was its lead voice in the literal sense: by 2010 she sang lead on 14 of the 20 best-selling cast recordings. The part earned her an Emmy nomination, two Golden Globe nominations, two Grammy nominations, a Screen Actors Guild ensemble award and a place on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people. It also braided her private life into the show. She and Cory Monteith, who played Finn Hudson, Rachel’s on-and-off boyfriend, began dating in 2012. He died in July 2013, and the series had to absorb the loss on screen while she absorbed it off it.

The years after Glee were busy without being defining. Columbia Records released her debut album, Louder, which entered the Billboard 200 at No. 4; Places, the holiday record Christmas in the City and a lullaby collection, Forever, followed. Her part-memoir, part-manual Brunette Ambition reached The New York Times best-seller list. On screen she joined Garry Marshall’s ensemble comedy New Year’s Eve, wore Hester Ulrich’s neck brace in Murphy’s Scream Queens opposite Jamie Lee Curtis, and co-starred in the ABC sitcom The Mayor. None of it gave her a second Rachel.

Then came June 2020. After Michele posted a message supporting Black Lives Matter, Samantha Marie Ware, who had joined Glee in its final season, accused her of bullying and “traumatic microaggressions” on set. Former castmates including Heather Morris, Alex Newell and Amber Riley backed the wider picture of a hostile, difficult colleague, although Riley and Morris disputed that her behaviour had been racist. Michele apologised, calling herself “unnecessarily difficult” and her conduct a sign of immaturity, and HelloFresh ended its partnership with her. A stranger story ran in parallel: an internet joke, born on a podcast in 2017, that she could not read. She told The New York Times in 2022 that if she were a man “a lot of this wouldn’t be the case”, and in 2025 she read a podcast host’s note cards aloud to bury it. The two stories are not the same, and folding them into one pile of online noise erases the part she admitted.

Broadway is where the repair happened, in a role Glee had already written for her. Rachel Berry spent seasons obsessing over Funny Girl before landing Fanny Brice in a fictional revival. In September 2022 Michele took over the real revival from Beanie Feldstein, opposite Ramin Karimloo and again under Mayer. Jesse Green, who had panned the production in The New York Times, came back and wrote that she made the show “worth watching again”, while insisting she could not make it good. Sales surged and Time put her back on its 100 list in 2023. As a replacement, she was ineligible for a Tony.

Chess was supposed to fix that. The revival of the Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Tim Rice musical, with a new book by Danny Strong and Mayer directing her for a third time, opened at the Imperial Theatre in November 2025 with Michele as Florence Vassy, caught between Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher. Critics were split on the show and far less split on her; her “Nobody’s Side” was the number reviewers kept singling out. The Tony nominators passed her over anyway, while Broadway.com’s audience vote handed her three awards, including favorite leading actress in a musical. She gave her final performance on June 21, 2026, and the producers closed the show the same night, cancelling the run of her announced successor, the singer JoJo. There are few cleaner measures of box-office pull, and few more double-edged.

Off stage the circle is smaller. Michele, who turned 40 on August 29, married businessman Zandy Reich in Napa in 2019; they have a son, born in 2020, and a daughter, born in 2024. She has spoken openly about her polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis, and Groff, her partner in Spring Awakening and Rachel’s love interest Jesse St. James on Glee, remains her most enduring friend in the business.

The reboot has no release date and no announced plot. Disney+ and Hulu ordered it with 20th Television producing, and Murphy has said he wrote the script with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, the trio behind the first two seasons. Heather Morris and Chord Overstreet have already hinted on social media that they are in. What the project inherits is the question Michele has been answering in front of paying audiences since 2022: whether the performer can outrun the reputation. Rachel Berry always believed the solo was hers by right. Michele, walking back into that room, has to earn it.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Ryan Murphy, Glee, Jonathan Groff, chess, Lea Michele

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