Cracked Open

Lea Michele doing a Terry Richardson shoot for V Magazine was surprising. She was always the careful one on Glee—actually careful, not just playing cautious. The kind of actress who seemed genuinely aware of how she was perceived and invested in maintaining a certain image.

Cory Monteith’s death in 2013 changed things for her. He was the one everyone liked, genuinely likable in that effortless way, and then he died, and she had to keep going through that show with that loss sitting on her chest. That does something to a person.

Years later she’s in V Magazine, photographed by Richardson—the photographer everyone knows has some weird dark energy, all those stories about what happens in his studio. She’s there vulnerable in a deliberate way, letting herself be seen differently. In an interview with Mary H.K. Choi she talks about Cory, about what his death cracked open in her, about how it made her rethink who she wanted to be.

There’s a running joke about friends calling her Grandma, some reference that probably meant something specific to her world but reads as just this hint that whatever identity people had pinned on her, it wasn’t really hers.

I watched her come back looking different after all that. Not polished or reinvented or any of those words people use. Just different. Still Lea Michele, but less concerned with the version of herself other people needed her to be.