Jenna Ushkowitz details the time she hit her breaking point on Glee
- In the latest episode of “And That’s What You Really Missed”, Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin McHale’s Glee rewatch podcast, Jenna details the time she hit her breaking point on Glee and the producers wrote her out of the show for a couple of episodes. In the “Michael” episode (3x11), Tina (Jenna’s character) was basically not in the script at all: she had no singing or speaking lines. Jenna says it had now been several episodes where Tina was given nothing to do, and that the show creators never understood what to do with Tina to begin with. This made Jenna start to question her worth and whether she even belonged in the show.
- By that point, a lot of people had started to act out and get rewarded by it. She decided, “if they’re going to act out, then I’m REALLY pissed because I have no storylines, so why the F shouldn’t I act out and hopefully start getting storylines?”. She started acting out, talking back and behaving in a way she never had and never would again. She left after a scene and didn’t want to come out of her trailer. She says she was miserable and felt the need to physically remove herself from the situation.
- She was called into the producers’ office and they said “We don’t know what’s going on with you and we can’t legally say what we think is going on with you, but we think you should take a vacation.” She missed most of the Michael episode, as well as the full next episode “The Spanish Teacher”. She was upset because they didn’t ask how she was doing, if she needed anything or why she was feeling that way. They just told her to go away. (She acknowledges it was a paid vacation).
- Rumors began spreading on set because Jenna wasn't showing up. She started having panic attacks because she wasn’t there to defend herself and she didn’t know what was being said about her. She met with some cast members and some of them tried to explain to her that she couldn’t act out like other people could because she was not in the position to do that, and she could potentially lose her job.
- Jenna says it’s upsetting to watch the episode because it takes her back to a time when she was not in a good place with the show and felt like she was being treated poorly by the people involved. Kevin says Jenna more or less always got the brunt of negative things by the higher-ups. They mention an email that the full cast sent and signed to the producers, and it happened to come from Jenna’s email. Even though it was from the whole cast, Jenna was the only person who got in trouble. Kevin says a lot of what happened on the set of Glee was gaslighting. This exact timeframe is when Darren Criss took a few episodes off to do “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”. Jenna and Kevin call that out as a double standard of some cast members being allowed to do stuff outside of Glee whereas it would be much harder for other cast members to get approval.
- Kevin mentions that when they filmed Black or White (once Jenna had been asked to leave), the cast felt overworked and frustrated because they had been filming the number for 8 hours with little to no direction or supervision. They texted Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy saying “somebody needs to get to set because we don’t know what’s going on, nobody has been telling us what to do”. Brad and Ryan showed up and talked to the director and the camera crew and then came back and laid into the cast. That was the last time Ryan Murphy ever came to the set of Glee until the end of the show 3 years later. Kevin says he thinks Ryan was done with the cast and thought they were bratty and shitty.
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