Of all the actors on Glee, the last one I would have expected to have had drug problems is Cory Monteith. He just seems so nice, normal and wholesome. Sure his character is like that too, but he’s very kind in interviews, he seems low key and apart from a brief stint dating Taylor Swift he’s in no way “Hollywood.” It’s not like he’s been papped out at the clubs or the hotspots, and he doesn’t go to a lot of events. We may know now why Monteith, who is an incredible 29 years old yet convincingly plays a teenager, stays under the radar. He recently told Parade that he went to rehab 10 years ago for a very serious drug addiction that easily could have killed him. That’s shocking!

“I’m not Finn Hudson,” Monteith says of his beloved Glee character in the exclusive interview with Shawna Malcom in Sunday’s PARADE. Discussing his troubled past as he never has before, Monteith explains, “I’m lucky on so many counts—I’m lucky to be alive.”

His parents divorced when he was 7, and 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. Monteith estimate s that by the age of 16, when he quit for good, he had attended 12 different schools, including alternative programs for troubled teens. “I burned a lot of bridges,” he says. “I was out of control.”

At that point, so was his drug use. Monteith admits, “I had a serious problem.” What kinds of drugs? “Anything and everything, as much as possible.”

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.”

“I stole a significant amount of money from a family member,” he admits. “I knew I was going to get caught, but I was so desperate I 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: 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.

“I was done fighting myself,” Cory recalls of his turning point. “I finally said, ‘I’m gonna start looking at my life and figure out why I’m doing this.’”

[From Parade]

I can’t imagine what his poor mother must have gone through to see her son spiral so quickly like that. There’s more on Parade about how Cory reunited with his dad after not seeing him for 17 years. I found what he said about the reunion very touching “at some point, you realize your parents are human. They make the best decisions they can with the options available to them.” He sounds so wise. Cory previously told Teen Vogue that he studies the people in the tabloids “who have kind of gone off the edge… so that I don’t do that.” It sounds like he’s already had plenty of experience with that and unlike a lot of the celebrities in the tabloids he learned from his mistakes and got sober long term.

Cory is shown in May, March and January, 2011. Credit: WENN.com