Glee regulars Lea Michele, Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer will not be back for the fourth season of the Fox musical hit.
In an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, series co-creator Ryan Murphy said that the three regulars will be among the characters who graduate at the end of the fall’s upcoming third season.
Colfer, Michele and Monteith are “not going to be back at all for Season 4,” Murphy said. “You can keep them on the show for six years and people will criticize you for not being realistic, or you can be really true to life and say when they started the show they were very clearly sophomores and they should graduate at the end of their senior year.”
Murphy added that planning for the future beyond high school will be a heavy theme during Season 3, noting that “more characters are leaving than are staying” when graduation time comes at the season’s end.
“We’ve never done anything by the book,” he said, adding that who’s graduating and who’s staying will be revealed in the Sept. 20 season premiere. “We made that decision and I involved Chris and Lea and they thought that was a good idea. They both trust the writing and trust me and felt that it would be great to have an open and closed experience for them to go out while they were on top.”
Source: hollywoodreporter
