Lea Michele Says "Glee's" Goodbye To Finn Hudson Is "Perfect"

"I feel like, for me personally, I’ve lost two people," the Glee star says in her first revealing interview since the death of her co-star and boyfriend, Cory Monteith. She also opens up about "The Quarterback," Thursday's episode that pays tribute to Monteith and his Glee character.

On Thursday, Glee fans will finally see the episode that says goodbye to Finn Hudson, the high school quarterback turned glee club coach portrayed by Cory Monteith, who died of a drug overdose in July.

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For the first time since his death, Lea Michele opened up about losing both Monteith and his Glee character.

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“I feel like, for me personally, I’ve lost two people: Cory and Finn,” Michele told TV Week Australia.

In "The Quarterback," the characters mourn Finn the way the cast mourned Monteith.

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“We had a beautiful memorial for Cory in the auditorium and some of the cast members sang and people spoke about him. It only felt right that we would do the same thing for Finn, so I felt it was very therapeutic," Michele noted. The actress also said that Monteith had taken a plaque from the choir room set. "He said, 'This summer we are going to take it all over everywhere we go and take pictures of us with this plaque!' and that’s what we did! Then I got the script and thought it was so unbelievable that they chose to do that in the episode," she added.

It was really Michele who helped the show go on.

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When asked if it was hard to film the episode, Michele said, "The truth is it’s no harder at work than it is in life so we might as well all be together as a family supporting each other to get through this together."

Matthew Morrison (above), who plays Will Schuster, told TV Week Australia that Michele "had one of the first songs we filmed for the episode and she did it so beautifully and after, she said something like, 'It can’t be harder for anyone else than it was for me' ... So, we knew we had to show up because our leader stepped forward and kind of gave permission to all of us to do it. I don’t think we could have done it without her."

And she feels "very lucky" for having known Monteith.

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"I really woke up every single day feeling like I was being in some sort of spell or something, that I was lucky enough to have him in my life," Michele said of Monteith. “There was no greater man than Cory, so for the time we spent together I consider myself very lucky.”

For more from Michele on Monteith and Glee, click over to TV Week Australia's Facebook page.

Watch Glee's tribute episode to Cory Monteith, "The Quarterback," on Thursday, Oct. 10 at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT on Fox.