Lea Michele Covers Nylon September 2012

Lea Michele covers Nylon September 2012 without looking like she’s about to molest the camera person. Which is good. The 25-year-old is probably promoting Glee’s return because she somehow didn’t talk herself out of a job by publicly reacting to erroneous tabloid reports that she’d been fired. Remember, as punishment for talking to the press before talking to him, Ryan Murphy canned plans for Michele and Chris Colfer’s Glee special/ spin-off. And here she is promoting the show with anecdotes about using her breasts as weapons.

On her childhood: ‘I was a weird kid. I was eight years old saying, ‘I don’t want a day off. I’d like to work every day, please.”
On dealing with the media: ‘I’m sorry but it’s so strange. I always feel now that people only want to get the worst out of sitting and talking to me. I feel a weird thing where it’s like, ‘Do you just want to find out something bad?”
On her upcoming pop album: ‘I want to make songs where girls can just roll down the windows of their car or dance around in their rooms in their underwear, like, ‘I hate my ex-boyfriend!’ or ‘I’m so in love!’ because that’s what I want [to hear] power-girl songs.’
On all those diva rumors: ‘I think I was fighting so hard to change [representations of my personality], that I was not really being myself. [But] I came to a place where I’m much happier personally in my life and because of that I really don’t feel like I need to explain anything or be anything. I’m really proud of who I am.’
On her relationships on and off-screen: ‘We were Finn and Rachel before; I feel like they come first.’
On her love affair with Glee: ‘When the show first started I knew immediately that it was so special. But so much was happening for us so quickly that it was very much a whirlwind. And I don’t know what happened, but when this third season finished, I fell madly in love with it again.’
On shock value: ‘I feel like I’m the type of person who likes to shock people a little bit, too. For example, when I was in Spring Awakening, every night I had to do this nude scene. I always loved to find the one person in the audience who I knew was going to be uncomfortable, who throughout the show was cringing in their seat, and when [co-star] Jonathan Groff would undo my top, I loved it! I was like, ‘Take that!! How uncomfortable are you right now? I want you to be uncomfortable!’
Ryan Murphy on Lea’s talent: ‘I always thought she was very original. Then I heard her sing and I knew there was nobody like her. She’s a very rare talent–she’s very specific and unusual and yet also familiar. She’s in that canon of the great singer-actresses; there’s not many of them.’