Glee Creator Ryan Murphy on The Glee Project Winners and the Future of Lea Michele

Gleeks everywhere are gearing up for the third season of Glee to premiere on September 20, and according to show creator Ryan Murphy, it will be worth the wait. “I have my passion for [the show] back,” Murphy told Deadline.com, “and you can see the excitement on the set. The actors, I feel, are really renewed and excited and are thrilled to be there. It’s fun again.”

Part of that fun will definitely involve the four finalists from reality TV competition The Glee Project, all of whom will be featured on new episodes of the show. According to Murphy, finalist Lindsay Pearce will be playing the leader of a singing group to rival New Directions. Pearce, who made a TV splash singing “Gimme, Gimme” from Thoroughly Modern Millie will recur as a nemesis to Lea Michele’s character Rachel Berry and her first number (fittingly) will be “Anything You Can Do” from Annie Get Your Gun.

As for the The Glee Project’s two winners, Damian McGinty and Sam Larsen, Murphy says that McGinty will play “a foreign exchange student shacking up with Brittany [Heather Morris], and she of course believes him to be a leprechaun with magical powers.” No word yet on who Larsen will play when he appears “somewhere around Episode 10 or 11."

With all this fresh blood on the set, it’s only natural to wonder what will happen to current characters Rachel (Michele), Kurt (Chris Colfer) and Finn (Cory Monteith), who will all be graduating from high school at the end of this season. “There are lots of things they could do,” Murphy said, “They could become teachers. They could become college students. There are very organic ways you could keep them on the show, and keep them big, and keep the audience invested in them," he said. "But the show is always going to be about that choir room.”