Real Classmates of 'Glee' Creator Named in Show

David Karofsky wants you to know he's not now and never was a bully who beats up gay Ohio high school kids in a twisted effort to cope with his own same-sex attractions.

That's just the character named after him on the popular TV show "Glee" (8 p.m. tonight on Fox). The real Karofsky is actually a 40-year-old, straight, married father of two in Framingham, Mass. He also was childhood friends with Hollywood writer Brad Falchuk, creator of Fox's second-year musical dramedy in which students in Lima, Ohio, break out in song more often than they sit for exams.

It turns out, Falchuk does this a lot with folks he knew from Beaver Country Day School, a private school in Brookline, Mass., from which he graduated in 1989. There was a real Rachel Berry at the school. And student Noah "Zuck" Zuckerman gave rise, at least in name, to bad boy Noah "Puck" Puckerman. Another "Glee" bully character, Azimio Adams, as well as Sean Fretthold, a paralyzed football player who appeared in one first-season episode, also echo names of Falchuk's classmates.

"Like many writers, I use all sorts of people from my past when naming the characters, but none of the characters we create are based on the people whose names I've used," Falchuk said in an e-mail to AOL News. "Since the show has been on, I've heard from a few of those whose names I've used, and they've all thought it was very funny to have characters on television bearing their names."

Funny and fun, yes. But also kind of trippy.

Falchuk had forewarned that there'd be a David Karofsky on "Glee," but the weight of it didn't quite compute until the show's massive Web fan base began reacting to the character's homophobic behavior.

In recent weeks, the fictional Karofsky, played by Max Adler, has become the show's pivotal villain, a student athlete who has so terrorized openly gay classmate Kurt Hummel that Kurt announced in the Nov. 23 episode that he's transferring to another school. In the Oct. 27 episode, when Kurt confronted Karofsky in private, the bully stunned him -- and viewing audiences -- by kissing him, then denying that and becoming even more menacing.

"Every time 'Karofsky' is mentioned, I get a Google alert, so I must get a half-dozen alerts a day, and 90 percent is related to 'Glee' and not to me," Karofsky said. In fact, he abandoned his first Twitter name, @DKarofsky, after he began picking up numerous "Glee" fans as followers uninterested in tweets related to his business consulting company.

"Right after the show airs, there's usually a whole bunch of fan fiction that starts to take off and I get alerts for it," he said. "It's really very funny."

Zuckerman is now a 39-year-old father of two who lives in Portland, Ore., and is vice president of an aviation company.

He and Karofsky said the resemblances between the actual and fictional people are minor if they exist at all. Both were student athletes, like their on-screen characters, but they don't believe they were bullies. And neither can sing, they said.

Zuckerman wore a flat-top instead of Puckerman's signature fohawk back in the day. He joked that it can get a little awkward on his couch at home when Puck, played by Mark Salling, tosses a classmate into the Dumpster or makes a bitingly sexist remark.

"Unfortunately, every time Puck does something bad, my wife looks at me in disgust," Zuckerman said. "She doesn't like seeing him being mean to people."

The real Rachel Berry, who could not be reached for this report, also wasn't the hyper-ambitious, conceited vocal talent portrayed by Lea Michele on "Glee," according to Peter Gow, Beaver Country's director of college counseling. Gow was a history teacher during the Falchuk era.

In fact, Gow said, the small private school didn't have a glee club, aka show choir, nor much of a bullying problem.

"That's not at all how those guys were, so I'm kind of guessing Brad's having some fun with that," Gow said. "Rachel Berry, if she was annoying, that never crossed my radar at all. She had a lot of friends and she was not a driven, Type A, me-me-me type person any more than David Karofsky and Azimio Adams were bullies."

Gow has enjoyed the process of being made fake-famous by Falchuk, too. He noticed online a casting call for a character called Peter "Chainsaw" Gow, who turned out to appear in one episode as the divorce attorney involved with the split between glee club teacher Will Schuster, played by Matthew Morrison, and his shrewish wife, Terri, played by Jessalyn Gilsig.

"Nobody ever called him by his name in the show, but IMDB said it was Peter Gow," Gow said. "It was kind of an inside thing that Brad put in there because there was a standing joke all my life that sometimes people assume I'm Asian because of my name. So the lawyer on the show is, of course, Asian."

Karofsky's family and friends find the whole thing amusing, he said.

In the Nov. 23 episode, the fictional Karofsky was hauled into the principal's office with his father, whom Falchuk named Paul after the real David Karofsky's dad. The real Karofsky hopes the character on the show is redeemed and maybe even gets to sing, but he said would never ask Falchuk what's coming up.

He's honored, he said, to have a part in a major plotline, a fictional portrayal of the serious, current problem of gay students being bullied and receiving inadequate help from school administrators.

"I'm more flattered than anything else," Karofsky said. "Brad had a whole lot of friends in high school, and he picked me. The fact that he's using my name to me is a compliment that he thinks of me regardless of who this character is, whether he's this bully or he's the star of this show or whoever. It's been the fuel to rekindle my friendship with Brad, too. It's like I'm touching stardom, which is kind of cool."

source: aolnews.com