It took everything in Andy Cohen to not ask Lea Michele about her alleged inability to read when he ran into her at a party over the weekend.
Cohen returned to his Sirius XM radio show Andy Cohen Live today, where he complained about the difficulty he faces while teaching his five-year-old son to read. Listeners called in with advice to help the process flow more smoothly, prompting Cohen’s co-host John Hill to joke, “It’s hard. Lea Michele never cracked it.”
As the chronically online know, the “Lea Michele can’t read” conspiracy theory began in a 2017 episode of the pop culture podcast One More Thing. When the late Naya Rivera claimed in her memoir that Michele refused to improvise her lines on the set of Glee, the podcast’s co-hosts speculated that this could be because she was illiterate and therefore had director Ryan Murphy feed her her lines during her scenes, per Entertainment Weekly.
Cohen recalled running into Michele as he was leaving a party over the weekend, noting that he congratulated her on “everything,” likely referring to her pregnancy.
“I wanted so badly — I almost said to her, ‘You know this thing about you not being able to read is just the funniest thing,'” Cohen explained. “I wanted to say, like, ‘Oh, we’ve had so much fun with that,’ or something. But then I was like, ‘You know what? Maybe keep your mouth shut. You just got out of this party alive.'”
The Watch What Happens Live host previously chatted about the rumor with Glee alum Darren Criss during a February episode of the hit late-night talk show.
“It’s my favorite thing. I love exacerbating this rumor as much as humanly possible,” Criss said. “If anybody loves this rumor the most, it’s me — and I definitely fuel this flame. She’ll be so angry that I’m doing this.”
Criss later added, “Of course she can [read]. Or can’t she and I’m just protecting her from her vulnerable position?”
However, Cohen said he heard that “Jonathan Groff does all her reading for her” which is “why they’re always together,” to which Criss replied, “OK. So maybe I’ll add myself. Maybe I transcribe things for her in a script that she can understand. We have secret hand signs.”
