“Glee” Star Recalls the 'Ridiculously Strange Story' of Landing His Role on the Series with a Broken Neck

Landing a role on Glee was not an easy task for Stephen Tobolowsky. In fact, it involved a “ridiculously strange story” leading up to the audition. 

Tobolowsky, 73, played Sandy Ryerson — an ousted teacher-turned-local drug dealer at William McKinley High School — for eight episodes on Glee. Although his time on the show was short-lived, he endured tornado-force winds, a near-fatal neck injury and scheduling issues to audition for the role. 

On the Jan. 8 episode of And That's What You REALLY Missed, an iHeart Radio Glee rewatch podcast co-hosted by the show’s former stars Kevin McHale and Jenna Ushkowitz, Tobolowsky recalled the calamitous months leading up to his audition. 

“I had been horseback riding with my wife (Ann Hearn) on an active volcano in Iceland,” Tobolowsky remembers. “And we were hit by a gigantic wind off the Atlantic Ocean that lifted me and the horse off the ground like a tornado. [It] carried us, dropped us on the side of the mountain.”

The horse went nuts and threw the actor off its back. The last thing Tobolowsky remembers was flying through the air, through the tall grass on the side of the mountain. Later on, the horseback team found him in the fetal position on the “only dry piece of lava” on the lava plane.

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After the incident, Tobolowsky returned to the States and met with a doctor who informed him that he had what the doctor called a "fatal injury," despite the fact that he was, in fact, alive.

“ ‘You want to know why you’re alive?' ” Tobolowsky recalls the doctor’s question. “‘You’re alive because most people have a cervical spine that curves like this, but yours is freakish and it’s the opposite. So your neck just broke, but you did not break your spinal cord.’ ”

The recovery was going to be long and arduous, requiring three months of nothing.

“Near the end of my three months, when I am still unable to do anything, I get a script for this show called Glee. My first audition in months, and I still have a broken neck” Tobolowsky says. “I read the script and my first impression of Glee was, ‘Oh my God.’ And all I could say was it was so joyful. The script was so fun, so joyful.”

He was determined to get the role, despite his ever-present injury. Tobolowsky depended on his wife to transport him to the studio on the day of the audition. Upon arrival, an idea entered his head. 

“I’m going to lie,” Tobolowsly reveals. “I take my neck brace off and I stuff it under the casting couch. And I just sit there.”

He adds: “It is a buzzkill when you're on an audition and you’re hoarse, let alone you have fallen off a horse and have a broken neck.”

Tobolowsky sat in the waiting room of the oddly empty and quiet studio for 20 minutes before producer Ryan Murphy’s assistant came by. Turns out, Tobolowsky came a day early. Ashamed and embarrassed, Tobolowsky told the assistant the whole story and brought out the neck brace as proof.

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“I was gonna lie to everybody, and now you've given me a chance not to lie,” Tobolowsky tells the assistant. 

So Tobolowsky returned the next day. This time, he entered the room with Murphy and the rest of the producers for his audition before Murphy addressed the elephant in the room.

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“‘I heard a very interesting story about you from yesterday,’” he recalls Murphy saying. 

Tobolowsky admitted his fault but promised to give the audition his all. He took off the neck brace and performed his scene and his song before putting it back on. He found out almost immediately he got the part. 

“It was the broken neck story that probably got me on to Glee,” Tobolowsky says.

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