What Rachel Berry Left at the Studio Door

Lea Michele had spent years building a very particular public persona: the overachieving theater kid from Glee, intense and humorless in the best possible way, a voice that could knock you flat while the character she played made you want to shake her. Prim, controlled, the kind of famous that stays carefully inside its own lane. So when she turned up in V Magazine shot by Terry Richardson, looking like she’d decided to burn all of that down in a single afternoon—yeah. I paid attention.

She’d apparently told friends for years that she was the group grandmother. But now grandma is getting photographed half-naked by Terry Richardson, so everything checks out, was roughly her framing. There’s something I like about that—the self-awareness of someone who knows exactly what image they’re dismantling. Richardson’s photographs tend to reduce their subjects to a single statement, but Michele comes through as something more complicated than that.

The interview inside, conducted by writer Mary H.K. Choi, covers the death of Cory Monteith—her boyfriend, her co-star, the person she was apparently building a future with before he died of an overdose in July 2013. He was 31. That loss sits underneath everything else in the shoot. You don’t reinvent yourself this sharply without something pushing you. Whether these photographs are the reinvention itself or just its announcement, I genuinely can’t tell. But I’m glad she made them.