Corey Monteith's Drug Use & His Advise To Those Who Want to Quit
Photo by Jeff Lipsky
That fans buy the 29-year-old Canadian as an all-American high school student is a tribute to the actor’s talent—though the show’s hairstylists deserve a little credit as well. “They hide the gray,” Monteith says with a laugh, digging into a plate of lasagna at a favorite restaurant in the Hollywood Hills. “I’m not a full-on silver fox, but I’m gettin’ on!”
Unlike the dim-witted Finn, who seems most confident expressing himself through song, Monteith is articulate and self-aware, displaying the focus that, in two short years, has propelled him from little-known actor to breakout TV star. He’s set his sights on big-screen success, too: His new film—the romantic comedy Monte Carlo, starring Selena Gomez and Leighton Meester—opens July 1.
Monteith’s future didn’t always seem so promising. In fact, his own teen years were such a minefield that he was lucky to make it to age 20. Opening up about his troubled past as he never has -before, Monteith wants to deliver a message for anyone struggling as he once did: “There is a way out. You never know what’s in store for you.”
The actor grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, feeling like an outsider. “I didn’t have any definition of self,” he says. After his parents divorced when he was 7, he saw less of his father, who was in the military. He began having difficulties in school. “I never fit in, so I started pretending I was other people. I’d find people I thought were cool and dress how they dressed, talk how they talked, do whatever they were into.” By 13, Monteith—once a promising student who at age 5 could read at a fourth-grade level—was skipping school to get drunk and smoke pot. He eventually dropped out.
His mother, an interior decorator, told him to return to school and stop the rebellious behavior—or find a new home. The tough love worked, but only for brief -periods. “I’d go back for two weeks so I didn’t have to find a friend’s house where I could crash,” says Monteith, who estimates that by age 16, when he quit for good, he’d attended 12 different schools, including alternative programs for troubled teens. “I burned a lot of bridges. I was out of control.”
By then, so were the drugs. “Anything and everything, as much as possible,” he says, when asked to elaborate. “I had a serious problem.”
Afraid that he “could die,” his mother and a group of friends staged an intervention when he was 19. “That’s when I first went to rehab. I did the stint but then went back to doing exactly what I left off doing.”
Monteith might have continued down that path if not for what he calls “the crystallizing event.” He pauses to find the right words. “I stole a significant amount of money from a family member,” he continues quietly. “I knew I was going to get caught, but I was so desperateI didn’t care. It was a cry for help. I was confronted and I said, ‘Yeah, it was me.’ It was the first honorable, truthful thing that had come out of my mouth in years.”
He was given an ultimatum: He had to get clean, or the family member would report him to the police and press charges. Although it wasn’t the first time Monteith had taken something that didn’t belong to him (“A lot of things went missing when I was around; I had high overhead to take care of”), up until that point he had avoided prosecution. He thought of other kids his age—the former classmates who’d gone off to college, as well as the fast crowd he’d long considered his close friends, some of whom were in jail or, worse, dead. “I was done fighting myself,” he recalls of his turning point. “I finally said, ‘I’m gonna start looking at my life and figure out why I’m doing this.’”
Monteith left Victoria and moved in with a family friend in the small industrial city of -Nanaimo. It was there, living in a double-wide trailer, that he began the painstaking process of rebuilding his life. He quit using, got a job as a roofer, and surrounded himself with other sober people. Among them was Andrew McIlroy, a Vancouver-based acting coach who came to Nanaimo on the weekends to teach. “I understood where he’d come from,” says McIlroy, “and I thought, ‘If this fish slips back into the sea, we may never see him again. Keep him busy.’”
McIlroy offered him free classes in exchange for tidying up around the acting studio and running errands. Then one day he put Monteith in front of the camera to do a scene about a guy contemplating suicide and realized acting could provide more than just a distraction for the young man. “Cory was working from some very dark truths,” says McIlroy. “I remember going, ‘Okay, this is something you can reasonably think of doing as a career.’”
It was a life-altering moment for Monteith, the first time he’d felt the satisfaction of “working hard and being good at something.” Though acting was still a way to pretend to be other people, it built up his confidence instead of tearing it down.
A few months after moving to Nanaimo, Monteith tossed his scant belongings into a garbage bag and relocated to Vancouver to begin auditioning for roles. Again, McIlroy—the father figure Monteith had long yearned for—provided crucial support, letting the young actor crash at his place and introducing him to agent Elena Kirschner. “A lot of people get into acting because they want to be famous,” says Kirschner, who still guides Monteith’s career. “But it’s never been about that for Cory. He consistently worked hard and absorbed like a sponge. And he’s never stopped.”
That work ethic would eventually land him guest spots on shows like Supernatural and, in 2009, his costarring role on Glee, despite his lack of vocal training. While the production schedule for the Fox hit is grueling—even during the summer, thanks to the Glee Live! concert tour—Monteith, who also plays drums for the fledgling Cali-rock band Bonnie Dune, isn’t complaining. He knows how fortunate he is. “What’s exciting to me now,” says the actor, who is single and lives with roommates in a rental house, “is seeing where this all goes.”
Along with the career success have come personal victories. This spring, Monteith received a high school diploma from one of the alternative schools he attended in Victoria—“based,” he says, “on abilities demonstrated in the workplace.” And in November 2009, he got together with his father for the first time in 17 years. “We’d spoken maybe three or four times [during that period],” Monteith says, “and he reached out to me on Facebook. I couldn’t shut the door, so I got on a plane. He greeted me at the airport, and [he and Monteith’s stepmother] were so happy they were almost crying. It was a good time. At some point, you realize your parents are human. They make the best decisions they can with the options available to them.”
The perspective he has gained is part of the reason he has chosen to speak out now about his extraordinary journey. “I don’t want kids to think it’s okay to drop out of school and get high, and they’ll be famous actors, too,” says Monteith, who works with a group called Virgin Unite that helps at-risk youth. “I’m lucky on so many counts—I’m lucky to be alive.
“But for those people who might give up: Get real about what you want and go after it. If I can, anyone can.”
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