Matthew Morrison Says He Was Planning to Leave Glee Before Cory Monteith's 2013 Death

Matthew Morrison says his tenure on Glee could have been much shorter.

Morrison appeared on the latest episode of his former costars Kevin McHale and Jenna Ushkowitz’s podcast, And That’s What You REALLY Missed, Thursday and revealed that he was planning to depart the Fox series before Cory Monteith’s death in 2013. 

“I was actually trying to get off the show,” Morrison, 45, 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,” the actor, who played teacher Will Schuester for six seasons until Glee's end in 2015, 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.”

But everything changed after Monteith’s death.

“Then Cory passed, and then they said they couldn’t do it,” he said. “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,’ ” Morrison continued. “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.”

Monteith was found dead on July 13. 2013, in his room at Vancouver’s Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel. Authorities said he died of a “mixed drug toxicity” of heroin and alcohol. Monteith was 31.

In April of that year, the actor was released from a rehab facility for substance abuse. He had admitted himself to the facility.

Also during the podcast, Morrison reflected on trying to juggle filming the show with performing solo concerts, as well as battling negativity about his character in the news and on social media. 

Admitting his time on the show was filled with “super highs highs and devastating lows,” Morrison said that he became “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.”

Psoriasis is a chronic and incurable skin disease that causes a rash with itchy, scaly and sometimes painful patches, according to the Mayo Clinic.

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“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,” said Morrison. “And not like woe is me because it was an amazing opportunity, but we were all there, it was like a war.”