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Why Hollywood Dropped Chris Colfer

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Chris Colfer didn’t get blacklisted by Hollywood — he just stopped answering casting calls.

When Glee premiered on Fox in 2009, Chris Colfer was the breakout nobody saw coming — a teenager from Clovis, California, playing Kurt Hummel, a role Ryan Murphy wrote specifically for him after seeing his audition tape. Colfer won a Golden Globe for the part in 2011. Then, in 2015, Glee ended its run, and Colfer largely vanished from screens. The real story isn’t that Hollywood pushed him out — it’s that he walked toward something else entirely.

• Colfer won a 2011 Golden Globe for playing Kurt Hummel, a character Ryan Murphy invented for him personally.
• In 2012, he wrote, produced, and starred in the indie film Struck by Lightning, and that same year published his first novel, The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell.
• By June 2017, 20th Century Fox and 21 Laps Entertainment had tapped him to write and direct the feature adaptation of The Wishing Spell — his directorial debut.

The Typecasting Question

Any actor who becomes globally famous for one role runs into the same problem: audiences stop being able to see anything else. That risk was especially real for Colfer, an openly gay performer whose signature role was a gay teenager finding his voice through show choir. The easy narrative is that casting directors couldn’t picture him as anyone but Kurt, and the offers dried up. What actually happened is less about Colfer getting rejected and more about him not showing up to the party.

The Pivot Nobody Was Watching

While Glee was still airing, Colfer was already building a second career. Struck by Lightning in 2012 marked his first screenwriting and producing credit, and he cast himself in the lead — proof he wasn’t waiting for Hollywood to write him a part. That same year, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers published The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell, a middle-grade fantasy series that turned into a genuine publishing phenomenon rather than a celebrity vanity project.

Between 2012 and 2017, Colfer wrote six mainline books in the series — The Wishing Spell, The Enchantress Returns, A Grimm Warning, Beyond the Kingdoms, An Author’s Odyssey, and Worlds Collide — plus picture-book spin-offs, and capped it with a standalone YA novel, Stranger Than Fanfiction, in 2017. He still popped up on camera occasionally, with a guest cameo on Hot in Cleveland and a role in 2016’s Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, but those were exceptions, not the plan.

He didn’t get dropped by Hollywood — he became a New York Times bestselling author and started writing his own parts instead of waiting for someone to offer him one.

Building Something He Owns

The clearest signal of where Colfer’s ambitions landed came in June 2017, when 20th Century Fox and 21 Laps Entertainment announced he’d adapt and direct the film version of The Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell — his feature directorial debut, built from material he created from scratch. He was also developing television projects on the side, including an original sci-fi drama called Indigo. It’s the same trajectory a lot of former child and teen stars have chased, moving from in front of the camera to owning the intellectual property behind it, a shift that’s reshaped plenty of TV careers over the past decade.

It’s a path with company. Performers who outgrow the role that made them famous either fight to be seen differently or start building their own material — the same instinct that pushed someone like Lin-Manuel Miranda from stage performer into a full-blown writer-producer. Colfer just did it with wands and fairy-tale kingdoms instead of hip-hop and Founding Fathers.

His Political Standing in Late 2018

By the time this retrospective aired, Colfer had six novels, a produced indie film, and a major studio directing gig on his résumé — none of which required a casting director’s approval. He wasn’t chasing pilot season. He was the one greenlighting projects.

The Wishing Spell adaptation was still in development at Fox with Colfer attached to write and direct, which meant the actual test of this second act — whether audiences would follow Kurt Hummel behind the camera — hadn’t even happened yet.