Lea Michele and Cory Monteith's Teen Vogue Cover Shoot Photos

check out photos from lea michele and cory monteith's teen vogue cover shoot, plus go behind the scenes and read highlights from our cover story!
Photographed by Regan Cameron

O-M-Glee: Lea Michele and Cory Monteith
With triple-threat talent and starring roles on TV's hottest series, Broadway baby Lea Michele and rising heartthrob Cory Monteith are making geek chic.
by Lauren Waterman

perfect harmony is always pretty. But some of the best duets derive their power—and their charm—from the way that they blend two very different voices. Consider this summer's inescapable "California Gurls": The Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg collaboration layered a clear, lilting soprano over a somewhat rougher male vocal to memorable (and catchy) effect.

A similar dynamic is at work in the relationship between Lea Michele and Cory Monteith, the artfully mismatched pair at the center of FOX's musical smash hit Glee. The two actors have even less in common than their in-love alter egos, Rachel and Finn: Lea's an ambitious ex–New Yorker who made her Broadway debut at the age of eight—the part of a driven would-be star was written, series cocreator Ryan Murphy has said, with her in mind. And Cory's a Canadian-born former odd-jobber who was so unsure of his singing that he elected to "drum on Tupperware and wineglasses" with a pair of unsharpened pencils during his first audition for the show.

Yet at their recent Teen Vogue interview, conducted over lunch at a favorite Los Angeles café, the two stars demonstrated a winningly effervescent—and utterly un-fake-able—rapport.

Teen Vogue: So, you guys have gone from relatively unknown to pretty ubiquitous in the past eighteen months, thanks to the success of Glee. Do you feel like you're finally getting everything you worked so hard for?

Cory Monteith: No. I don't feel like I was working toward this at all! I didn't even know that you could get paid to be an actor when I first started doing this.

Teen Vogue: How did you start?

Cory Monteith: You want to take this one, Lea? She's heard this story, like, 100,000 times.

Lea Michele: We've all heard each other's stories.

Cory Monteith: I'll make it quick. I was 20 years old, working as a roofer and a telemarketer and driving a taxi, just barely getting by. A friend of a friend suggested I try acting. I was like, "Why? What am I going to do? Community theater?" But I took a class, and the teacher thought that I had potential, so I moved to Vancouver and started auditioning. I slept on someone's floor. I brought, like, two shirts and two pairs of pants.

Teen Vogue: Why didn't you pack more pants?

Cory Monteith: I didn't own any! I was dirt-poor. I could barely hold down a job. Eventually, though, I started getting small parts on shows like Smallville, Supernatural . . . and lots of really bad sci-fi movies. I was running around the woods in wolf contacts, covered in fake blood made out of pancake syrup, roaring.

Lea Michele: Hybrid. Check it out.

Teen Vogue: Did you enjoy that?

Cory Monteith: I was, like, so stoked. But when the Glee audition came around, my manager literally had to talk me into it. I was petrified to sing in front of anyone.

Lea Michele: Fast-forward two years, he's on stage at Radio City, singing live in front of 6,000 people and, like, loving it.

Cory Monteith: Loving it.

Lea Michele: He's a rock star.

Teen Vogue: And Lea, was this a goal of yours?

Lea Michele: I didn't expect to be an actor either. But I went to an audition, and I got a job. After my first night on stage, I turned to my parents and said, "I love doing this—don't ever stop me." But I was very content; I figured that my life's path was to be a Broadway performer. I only came out to L.A. because, after Spring Awakening—

Cory Monteith: You were in Spring Awakening? Sorry. That's a joke.

Lea Michele: Whenever we do an autograph signing and someone says, "I loved you in Spring Awakening," he says, "You were in Spring Awakening?" So anyway—I didn't think there'd ever be a part that was fitting for someone who looked like me, who acted like me. I was just stepping away from Broadway for a few months, and then Glee came around. And it's really opened my eyes to this world of film and television and made me realize that maybe there's a place for me.

Teen Vogue: Has it been difficult to bring in new cast members, like Chord Overstreet [who plays Sam]?

Cory Monteith: All of the girls on the show like Sam.

Lea Michele: He's a hottie.

Cory Monteith: And I think, for the most part, we've been welcoming. There's hasn't been any hazing or anything.

Teen Vogue: You guys seem very close—is it strange to play boyfriend and girlfriend on TV?

Lea Michele: We're such good friends that we've passed that level of weirdness. Cory farts in front of me.

Teen Vogue: And your boyfriend doesn't get jealous? About the kissing, I mean.

Lea Michele: Mine? Or Cory's? [laughs] My boyfriend [American Idiot star Theo Stockman] is an actor as well. So he understands.

Teen Vogue: Cory, are you seeing anyone?

Cory Monteith: No.

Lea Michele: Not like he would tell us.

Teen Vogue: He wouldn't even tell you?

Lea Michele: No.

Cory Monteith: I stay private about that stuff. I don't want to be like, "I'm seeing this girl . . ."

Lea Michele: And then we'd be like, "What happened to that sweet girl?"

Cory Monteith: Exactly.

Teen Vogue: So you were this way even before you were famous.

Cory Monteith: Yes.

Teen Vogue: Did either of you have high school sweethearts?

Lea Michele: I did. We're still good friends. We were together for a very long time.

Cory Monteith: Mine was in junior high. We couldn't hang out at her parents' house, so we hung out in this big field, underneath a willow tree. That's where we were the first time we made out. It was beautiful, tall grass and all that, but it was on the side of a highway, so people were honking their horns at us.

Teen Vogue: There've been so many rumors about various cast hookups.

Lea Michele: Oh, we've all gotten down and dirty. It's, like, nasty. We can't keep our hands off each other.

Cory Monteith: It's borderline disgusting.

Lea Michele: Raunchy. No, I hate to be boring, but we're just friends. I think Mark and Naya dated for a little while. . .

Teen Vogue: Yes, the key incident.

Lea Michele: And now it's the key incident. I have no idea. All I have to say is that it was nice when they were together.

Teen Vogue: Gossip about your love lives must be one of the strange things that you've had to get used to this year.

Cory Monteith: I see the people in the tabloids, the ones that get bad press, who have kind of gone off the edge, and I try to study them so that I don't do that. It seems like they lost focus at some point—that's the one thing they all have in common. The beauty of this show is that it's impossible for us to do that. We work 24/7/365. And I love it.

Lea Michele: And I think that we have a really wonderful kind of fame. These days you can become famous for a lot of things, but ours comes from being part of something that's so important.

Cory Monteith: It's hard to disagree with the effect that Glee has on people. Even if it's not your cup of tea, it's really hard to get negative about a show that's [about] singing and dancing and that makes people smile.

Lea Michele: There is some bad stuff that comes with this kind of popularity. But no matter what's going on in my life, the next thing I know, we're jumping on mattresses, having slushies thrown at us—or just having fun with each other. It really does make everything OK.

Edited for teenvogue.com. For the complete story pick up the November 2010 issue of Teen Vogue, on newsstands November 23!

source: teenvogue.com