Prince Charming: Glee star Chris Colfer turns teen author

Hearing a bunch of 40-year-olds talking about what’s appealing to teenagers is always funny,’ says Glee star Chris Colfer. ‘When I was a teenager, a studio executive told me that if I wanted to make a movie, it was going to have to be about how the character lost his virginity, how he wants to become popular, otherwise nobody’s gonna want to see it. I was like, “Absolutely not.” Not every teenager in the world is on a quest to become popular. I certainly wasn’t; when I was in high school, I wanted people to leave me alone.’

This is because he was, as he describes it, ‘an old soul’. Growing up in Clovis, an old freight-stop town in California, Colfer was a geeky kid who didn’t fit in. His sister Hannah is severely epileptic, they didn’t have much money, and Chris was chubby, precocious, gay, and ‘way too smart for my own good’. He was obsessed with history, but not the bloodybattles of the American Civil War. ‘Oh, gosh no! European kings and queens. At one point I could tell you every single monarch from Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth II. The whole lineage.’

The 23-year-old I meet is sweet, polite and a touch nervy, but way more ambitious than someone of that age should be. With his aforementioned film, Struck By Lightning, starring Rebel Wilson, already in the bag after he found independent funding, the actor/producer/writer has also found time to pen his first children’s book, The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell, about a twin brother and sister who after the death of their father escape into a book by literally walking into its pages. They enter a world of familiar fairy-tale faces, whom Colfer provides with unexpected backstories. ‘What the world fails to realise,’ says Snow White’s wicked stepmother at one point, ‘is that a villain is just a victim whose story hasn’t been told.’ The modern fairy tale, which he wrote while touring with the Glee cast, ‘typing, typing, typing’ between singing ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, went on to make The New York Times bestseller list.

While the book is very different territory from Glee, it comes with a similar mission statement: to explain the misfits. And it was jointly inspired by Colfer’s experiences in the world of celebrity and his upbringing in Clovis. He always wanted to act, despite the desire to be left alone, ‘because I remember being so desperately upset when a movie ended. I wanted to go into the other side of the screen.’ He fell into singing when school plays demanded it and by joining the church choir. But his singing voice never really broke. ‘My voice was so unique. I was never able to sing how I wanted to sing — I wanted to sing songs in my key! It was so frustrating. In choirs you get separated by gender, so I was like, “OK, tenor and bass, those are my options, great.” Sometimes I’d be uncomfortable singing low for so long. But I couldn’t think of another male character role with a high-pitched voice, apart from Mickey Mouse, and that was taken. So it was like, of course I can’t go into singing: there’s no part that exists for me.’ Plus, he was a Goody Two-Shoes. ‘Because I never wanted anyone to have any stories they could use against me some day. There are no old friends to come out of the woodwork,’ he laughs with a resigned self-awareness, ‘as I hardly had any.’

He first came up with The Land of Stories at the age of seven. ‘I have pictures of me as a kid, drawing the characters, doing the illustrations. But it wasn’t until I was on Glee and thrown into the spotlight, and shown examples of really nasty ways of human behaviour, that I thought of broadening the backstories of people who we thought we knew. There are so many people I’ve met who I thought I knew everything about, and then I meet them personally and go, “Oh, I was so wrong.” So Cinderella is almost like an X Factor kid, taken out of obscurity and talking about the price of fame. Sleeping Beauty has some part of her life romanticised, while other aspects are forgotten. Snow White will tell the twins about being vulnerable, how everyone thinks she’s just this really loving princess who is nice to animals, but it’s because she had so much rejection from her stepmother. Sleeping Beauty admits she’s got insomnia. The longer something is with you, the longer it has to marinate in your head, and it maybe ended up more psychological than I intended.’ Weirdly, he says all the characters in the book represent aspects of him. One twin is his lazy side, the other the know-it-all: ‘I used all the princesses therapeutically. Oh, sorry, they are queens, in my book — I don’t want to make them upset.’

In 2009 Glee had become one of the biggest shows in the world; each episode costs at least $3 million to produce and has generated more tweets than any other show on television. Gwyneth Paltrow and Sarah Jessica Parker begged creator Ryan Murphy for cameo roles and Michelle Obama invited the cast to sing at the White House. Colfer was the stand-out star, winning a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, plus Emmy nominations. Madonna praised his work (particularly in the Madonna episode). But despite this success, Colfer has no desire to rest on his laurels. In addition to starting filming season five of Glee this month (his part was invented especially for him, after he auditioned for a smaller role), Colfer has also written a sequel to his children’s book and has plans for more, if the demand is there; the storyline is already mapped out in his head. ‘But still, to this day I’m embarrassed to say, “Leave me alone, I have to write.” ’

So it’s not a huge surprise that the hardest-working 23-year-old in showbusiness now lives in LA, in a house he bought with his Glee earnings. ‘Everything that I have, I own. I grew up with very little, so when we started getting real money from the show, I was the person keen to buy a house; that way I’d always have a place to live whatever happened. I’m always very frugal and responsible with my finances.’ He’s not a big partygoer, although he recently went to a Beyoncé concert and somehow talked his way into a private viewing lounge. ‘I don’t think I was on the list but I had a couple of close friends in there so I convinced the bouncer to let me in,’ he laughs. (I ask if he had to serenade him with a Beyoncé number. ‘Oh, thank God, no,’ he replies, ‘that’s just the day job.’) If he ever has time off, which is rare, ‘I’ll go to sleep on my couch in my Cookie Monster pyjamas or watch mindless reality TV, like Real Housewives.’ As for boyfriends: ‘I can’t answer. Honestly, the only reason I won’t answer is because I have a very... passionate fanbase. There’s a group of them that can be very invasive sometimes, so I always keep those things to myself.’ Still, he wouldn’t rule out having a family one day. ‘Right now I’m very career-driven. Maybe when I’m 30 I’ll turn round and have that conversation with myself. “Do I want to have kids? Do I want to leave something behind?” We’ll see.’

These days he says he can’t even walk into a bookshop. ‘There are a lot of Glee fans, and they’re everywhere, always. I think my biggest fear is to upset or disappoint one of them, but when you’re constantly asked to stop and be famous, and not live your life... a lot of them don’t understand. I made the mistake of going to a movie theatre by myself in a touristy part of LA when shooting got cancelled one afternoon, and people were grabbing me, yanking me so they could take a picture and tell all their Facebook friends that they saw me. I left with bruises on my arms.’ You can see why Chris Colfer might be tempted to step inside a fairy tale once in a while.

The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell is out now in paperback (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, £5.99). The sequel, The Enchantress Returns, is published next month

Portraits by David Yeo

Styled by Anish Patel

Grooming Emma Leon using Dermalogica and Clinique