Ryan Murphy Talks GLEE Spinoff, 'Firings' and More

There have been many questions and rumors regarding the fate of three of GLEE's main characters: Rachel (played by Broadway veteran Lea Michele), Finn (Cory Monteith) and Kurt (Chris Colfer).

GLEE creator Ryan Murphy had said in an interview that the trio would be leaving the series at the end of the third season. During that early July interview, Murphy stated that the characters were "not going to be back at all for season 4."

A few weeks later, co-creator Brad Falchuk disagreed at Comic Con; he said that "they are not done with the show after this season."

So what's the story behind the depature - or lack thereof - of GLEE's stars?

They'll stick around for the fourth season, Murphy now says in an interview with Deadline.com. "When I did that interview, what was happening was we were asked to investigate doing a spin-off and it was a spin-off specifically for three of them, Chris, Cory and Lea," Murphy explains. "We weren't allowed to talk about a spin-off. It was too premature. We didn't want to do it then. The idea was to do it this fall when Glee gets back on the air. Then, to pick up and read the actors saying, 'We found out we were fired from Twitter.' All of us, the studio, the network, were like, 'OK, that isn't exactly cool,' because we involved all three of them in that decision. So then what happened is that we decided, 'OK, let's not do it.' So that's where we are today."

He was very clear, however, that the actors were never fired: "When I say they're seniors and they're not coming back to the show, what I did not say is they're not coming back to the show because there will be another show. What Brad [Falchuk] said this weekend at Comic-Con is now correct: they're graduating. What we wanted is to get people away from this idea that the actors were fired which is ludicrous. Nobody was fired. They were talked to for months about the show."

Is the spin-off still in the works? No, says Murphy. "We were [going forward with it]. Not now."