Highlights
- Kevin McHale slammed Glee curse fan comments as “diabolical” in a blistering X post
- Three castmates died between 2013 and 2020: Monteith, Salling and Rivera
- McHale blames “horrible coincidences,” not a curse, for the show’s tragedies
Kevin McHale has heard enough about the so-called Glee curse — and he wants the internet to log off.
The actor, who played Artie Abrams across all six seasons of the Fox musical juggernaut, unloaded on X Wednesday, July 29, 2026, after growing fed up with fan comments framing the deaths of three of his former castmates as some kind of supernatural toll. He called the rhetoric “diabolical and untethered from any sort of humanity or reality,” then signed off with a two-word obscenity aimed at the people pushing it.
McHale, 38, took specific aim at fans who describe his late colleagues as a “sacrifice” — language he made clear he finds indefensible when applied to real people with real families.
The three deaths that fuel the curse chatter span seven years. Cory Monteith died of a drug overdose in 2013 at 31. Mark Salling died by suicide in 2018 at 35, shortly after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography. Naya Rivera drowned accidentally in 2020 at 33 after saving her son during a boating trip.
The curse theory has circulated online for more than a decade, but it found new oxygen with the 2023 docuseries The Price of Glee, a three-part special that revisited the deaths and extended the idea beyond the cast to crew members who died unexpectedly since the show’s 2009 debut.
McHale has been publicly skeptical of the theory for years — and he was blunt about the alternative explanation.
“I think it unfortunately is just a lot of horrible coincidences and accidents,” he has said, noting that a large ensemble of young performers is subject to the same odds as any other production.
He’s also acknowledged that he and his surviving castmates cope in ways outsiders may not appreciate.
“We make jokes about a curse, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable,” McHale said on the Elvis Duran Show in 2024 — a distinction between gallows humor among grieving friends and strangers treating tragedy as content.
“It completely diminishes who these people were,” he has said of the curse label, pointing out that Rivera in particular died performing an act of heroism for her child.
The reaction to his post skewed supportive. “Please stop,” one fan wrote in agreement beneath the message.
McHale was especially close to Rivera, who was among his closest friends on and off set. He and castmate Jenna Ushkowitz have spent years unpacking the series on their rewatch podcast, And That’s What You REALLY Missed, where the tragedies are impossible to sidestep.
Ushkowitz, 40, once described a Season 3 storyline in which Monteith’s character learns his father died of an overdose as a scene that “hit a little too close to home.”
Glee ran from 2009 to 2015 and remains one of the most-streamed network series of its era, which has kept its fandom — and its darkest theories — very much alive.
McHale’s message this week suggests the cast’s patience for that particular strain of nostalgia has run out.
