Glee Creator Ryan Murphy Addresses Casting Confusion and Nixes Plans for a Spin-Off Starring Lea Michele

After initial reports were revoked that Glee stars Lea Michele, Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer would depart the series after the third season, the show's co-creator Ryan Murphy sat down with Deadline.com to explain all the confusion. Murphy states that he had originally been in discussion with the three actors about starring in a spin-off in which their characters would attend college at Juilliard, but media uproar has led to a halt of those conversations.

"Yes, they are graduating and they will not be back on the show for season four," Murphy said of the actors' future with the show. "We were asked to investigate doing a spin-off [specifically for Colfer, Monteith and Michele]. In March, Brad Falchuk and I started talking to all three of those actors about it... at that time all three of them expressed interest. They were involved in the process for three to four months to the point where we were even talking about cities and relocations and we called Juilliard...for those actors to say, 'I found out that I was fired off the show from Twitter,' is absolutely 100% not true."

Murphy notes that because discussions for a spin-off were in the earliest stages, not being able to talk about the project publicly may have led to much of the confusion. "We wanted to get those actors on the same page creatively. If they all agreed creatively, we would then move forward. We don’t have a deal with the network. I think what happened is Chris Colfer did an interview and the timing probably was a little bit unfortunate. I think that he was getting a lot of calls with people saying, 'You’re fired. You’re fired.' And all of them knew they weren’t fired, but it was an awful thing to read. And I felt for them. And they couldn’t come out and say, 'No, we weren’t fired. We’re talking about a spin-off.' Because we told them not to. And this has blown up. So now we’re not doing the spin-off."

Though Murphy reiterated that there are no current plans for a spin-off, he says he is open to revisiting the subject when Glee finishes its third season in the spring of 2012. The third season of Glee begins September 20 on Fox.