Kevin McHale has slammed “diabolical” comments branding the deaths of his Glee co-stars a “sacrifice” or down to a “curse”.
Kevin McHale has slammed “diabolical” comments branding the deaths of his Glee co-stars a “sacrifice”.
The 38-year-old actor – who played Artie Abrams in the musical drama series, which aired from 2009 to 2015 – vowed to “log off” after growing frustrated by fan posts about the show’s so-called “curse” due to the deaths of Cory Monteith, Mark Salling and Naya Rivera.
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.
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 said on the Elvis Duran Show in 2024: “We make jokes about a curse, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
“The amount of times we’ve said some things that everyone gets really quiet, we’re like, ‘No no, you [don’t] understand, if we don’t laugh about this we will all just be sad.’ ”
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 insisted the wave of deaths were “horrible coincidences and accidents” and similar tragedies happened on other programmes.
He said: “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.”
Kevin McHale furious over Glee ‘curse’ comments
