Idina Menzel: Playing Lea Michele’s Glee Mom ‘Wasn’t Great for the Ego’

Ryan Schwartz

Idina Menzel didn’t always love the idea of playing Lea Michele’s TV mom.

In a new interview recounting her time on Glee, the Tony Award winner reveals that she was conflicted when she got the call to play Shelby.

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“You’re worried you’re not going to work again, and then people hire you to be someone’s mother when you probably should be their older sister,” Menzel tells Stellar Magazine (via The New York Post). “It just wasn’t great for the ego.”

At the time, a 39-year-old Menzel had just given birth to her first child, and here she was being cast as mom to a 24-year-old Michele.

“I had my son Walker, and then three months later, I got the call [to be on Glee] and so I said ‘yes,'” she recalls. The new mom was still breastfeeding, and she “couldn’t fit” into any of her costumes.

“I sucked it up and sucked myself into my clothes,” she says, adding that she was “excited to work with [series co-creator] Ryan Murphy and be a part of that hit show.”

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Shelby was first introduced as a rival high school choir coach (and Rachel’s biological mother) midway through Season 1. It was considered dream casting at the time: Michele’s resemblance to Menzel had been noted long prior, when they both were on Broadway, and Michele had performed the Wicked showstopper “Defying Gravity” on a previous episode of Glee.

Menzel went on to appear in 12 episodes across Glee‘s first four seasons. She was last seen in Season 4’s “Sweet Dreams,” an episode that saw Rachel audition for Broadway’s Funny Girl. Nine years later, Michele was tapped to play Fanny Brice in the real-life revival.

Revisit Menzel’s first duet with her TV daughter below:

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