Teen Vogue has a new interview with Glee’s Lea Michele and Cory Monteith. Cory comes across as an eager kid who is so excited and grateful for his success. It’s like he just fell into acting and is elated that it’s working out for him. If I didn’t know anything about Lea, I would have a neutral opinion of her just on the basis of this interview. Since I’m informed about what an insufferable twit she can be, it seems like she’s keeping her ego in check due to Cory’s influence, and that’s a good thing. Lea’s personal life could be paralleling that of her Glee character, Rachel Berry, who has been kinder and less of a diva in recent episodes. Here’s some of what these two told Teen Vogue.

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: 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.

[From Teen Vogue]

They seem like nice kids, Cory especially. I’m surprised to learn that he’s 28 because he seems about 22 to me, tops. Lea is 24 and she comes across as the older one due to her personality. Lea mentions her boyfriend briefly. She’s dating another actor named Theo Stockman, who she’s been with since last year. Cory has been linked to Taylor Swift in the past and in this interview he says that he’s not seeing anyone now and if he was he wouldn’t even tell his coworkers about it. As for that quote he gives about people targeted by the tabloids “who have kind of gone off the edge” he’s talking about Lindsay and Britney isn’t he? There are a few people targeted by the tabloids due to their sheer level of fame and not because of anything they’ve necessarily done. He seems to be on the right track and is definitely a good influence on Lea.

Photos from Teen Vogue’s slideshow, where there are more.