Matthew Morrison Says He Was Going to Leave 'Glee,' But Cory Monteith's Death Changed Plans

Matthew Morrison is revealing some surprising scoop about his time on Glee.

The 45-year-old actor says the he was getting ready to say goodbye to Glee and leave the show early, but co-star Cory Monteith‘s death changed his plans.

Matthew made the revelation while appearing on the latest episode of Kevin McHale and Jenna Ushkowitz’s podcast, And That’s What You REALLY Missed.

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“I was actually trying to get off the show,” Matthew said. “In season 5, I asked to be off the show, because I was just like, I’m no longer being used in the way I wanted to.”

“And no disrespect to the show,” he continued. “We are at a high, I was like, ‘Maybe if I get off the show, I could go do something else, go do a movie or whatever,’ and they agreed to let me off the show. Then Cory passed, and then they said they couldn’t do it. Because you can’t have the two main guys on the show [leave]. So yeah, it was an interesting time.”

“Obviously I understood. I was like, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ You know, trying to reconcile my own wants and selfish needs with the grief of losing an amazing friend, you know, there’s a lot of just mixed emotions. But I’m a professional, I showed up, I did my job. And there was a good pay increase, so that worked too,” Matthew said.

Cory died in July 2013 in the summer leading up to the season five premiere of Glee. Matthew ended up playing Will Schuester in all six seasons of the series.

Matthew said that backlash to his character took a toll on him and he was “so stressed I broke into the craziest psoriasis.”

“It was everything building up and for me that was the physical manifestation of what I was feeling inside,” he said. “I remember watching it back at the time and being like, ‘Oh my god,’ they had to do so much, the psoriasis was everywhere on my body but my face was okay. But then it slowly started coming to my ears and my eyelids.”

He added, “In a nutshell I loved the experience and I appreciated it for what it was, but it was really challenging and it was hard to put our bodies through 16 hours a day and then all the other stuff we had to do on top of it. And not like woe is me because it was an amazing opportunity, but we were all there, it was like a war.”

Did you see Matthew‘s latest career update?