Kevin McHale dedicated his Rocky Horror Show debut to Cory Monteith.
Kevin McHale has made his Broadway debut
The 38-year-old actor paid tribute to his late Glee co-star, who died in 2013 from an overdose aged 31, with a special dedication included in his cast biography as he takes over the roll of Brad Majors from Andrew Durand.
In the Playbill for his Broadway debut on Tuesday (25.08.26), it read: “For Cory, his forever Brad.”
In season two of Glee, the show had an episode called The Rocky Horror Show where the Glee Club performed the classic musical.
On the show, Cory’s character Finn Hudson played Brad Majors, with Lea Michele’s Rachel Berry cast as Janet Weiss.
On the morning of his first Broadway show, Kevin – who played Artie Abrams in Glee – took to X and revealed a poetic way he was being reminded of Cory before the show.
Alongside a crying emoji, he wrote: “Sitting at breakfast and it’s song after song Cory sang on Glee. That’s my Brad.”
Last month, Kevin slammed “diabolical” comments branding the deaths of his Glee co-stars Cory Monteith, Mark Salling and Naya Rivera a “sacrifice”.
He wrote on X: “Let me log off today because the way too many of you talk about real people who have passed as a ‘sacrifice’ or a ‘curse’ in regards to a tv show is f****** diabolical and untethered from any sort of humanity or reality.”
Cory died from a drug overdose in 2013, and five years later, Mark took his own life shortly after pleading guilty to possessing images of child sexual abuse.
In 2020, Naya accidentally drowned while out boating on a lake with her son.
A 2023 documentary, The Price of Glee, also detailed the untimely deaths of five crew members of the show, with second team lead and background wrangler Jim Fuller and a “lead prop guy” named Paul both dying after suffering heart attacks, and Mark Watson, a “main stand-in” for Matthew Morrison, losing his life in a “car fire”.
In addition, production assistant Nancy Motes took her own life, and rigging gaffer J.A. Byerly revealed his brother and colleague also died by suicide after the show ended.
Kevin himself has previously admitted he and his co-stars have joked about the show being cursed, but insisted they were just using humour to deal with a difficult situation.
He also said the wave of deaths were “horrible coincidences and accidents” and similar tragedies happened on other programmes.
He said on the Elvis Duran Show in 2024: “I think it unfortunately is just a lot of horrible coincidences and accidents.
“It’s a big cast of a lot of young people and things happen.
“I think things happen on other shows as well and you’re working with crew members and things happen to crew members, you’re not necessarily hearing about that. But I just think a lot of unfortunate, really horrible accidents do happen.”
