Following his death, questions arose about how and if Glee would handle his passing and Finn’s absence on the show, with Murphy telling E! News they even considered ending the series.
Ultimately, despite the irrevocable void in the show’s core cast, the series went on, with Murphy revealing it was Lea Michele, Monteith’s longtime girlfriend who played the series star Rachel Berry, who made the call.
“If Lea had said to me, ‘I could never do this again and I don’t want to do this again,’ you know, she is sort of the show, so what do you do?” Murphy told E! News at the time. “And I would’ve, out of respect to her as a person, said ‘OK,’ but that’s not how Lea operates; that’s not how she feels. She’s handled this with so much humanity and grace and she’s also handled this in a way where she’s trying to look out for 500 other people affected by him and who have mortgages to pay and families to feed.”