Entertainment
Naya Rivera’s father claims late daughter and her Glee co-star Lea Michele ‘hated each other’-Pierra Willix-Entertainment – Metro
The pair worked together for six years.
The father of the late Naya Rivera’s claims she ‘hated’ Lea Michele (Picture: REX)
The cast of Glee haven’t exactly made a secret about the drama that went down when the cameras stopped rolling, but now the father of the late Naya Rivera has claimed she ‘hated’ Lea Michele.
Running from 2009 until 2015, the teen singing drama followed the students involved in the New Directions glee club at the fictional William McKinley High School.
While Lea played enthusiastic performer Rachel Berry, Naya played cheerleader Santana Lopez, who first joined in to spy on the club, but eventually learnt to embrace it.
Working together across all six seasons, rumours started surfacing in 2014 that Naya had complained about Lea’s ‘diva antics’ on set.
In 2023, Naya died aged 33 after a boating accident.
Her death is now the subject of the three-part Investigation Discovery docuseries The Price of Glee, which also delves into the passing of her former co-stars Corey Monteith and Mark Salling.
Naya and Lea worked together on Glee for six years (Picture: FOX Image Collection via Getty Images)
Speaking on the series, Naya’s dad George revealed more about the tension between his daughter and Lea.
‘There was always a fight between them. Always. Everybody knew. Everybody saw it,’ he said.
‘They hated each other but, at the same time, respected each other’s talent.’
Naya wrote about her relationship with Lea in her 2016 memoir (Picture: Fox)
In her 2016 memoir Sorry not Sorry, Naya wrote that Lea ‘didn’t like sharing the spotlight’.
‘She had a hard time separating work from our outside friendship, whereas it was a lot easier for me… Lea was a lot more sensitive, though, and sometimes it seemed like she blamed me for anything and everything that went wrong.
Lea has been at the centre of bullying allegations for several years now (Picture: Evan Agostini/ Invision/ AP, File)
It’s certainly not the first time former Glee stars have spoken out against Lea.
The first public allegations came in 2020 from actress Samantha Marie Ware, who said that Michele made her ‘first television gig a living hell’.
She added that there were ‘other traumatic microaggressions’ that made her question a career in Hollywood.
Other Glee actors jumped onto social media soon after to throw their support behind Ware, with Amber Riley, who played Mercedes on all six seasons of the show, alluding to the drama by sharing gifs of herself appearing to take pleasure in the tea being spilled.
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Heather Morris, who played Brittany, also called Michele ‘unpleasant to work with’, and said she believed her behaviour was right to be called out.
Soon after, Michele issued a lengthy statement on social media, where she apologised to those she had hurt, and said she would ‘be better in the future’.
Metro.co.uk has contacted Lea Michele’s representatives for comment.
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