"Every time, the older I get, the more I hate Will Schuester," says Jocelyn Silk, a 17-year-old high school student who started the " get Schuestered" trend this fall (think Rickrolling, but with a breakdancing Morrison). But upon rewatching Ryan Murphy’s satirical musical dramedy, they also found themselves looking at it with a wholly new perspective - particularly when it came to Morrison’s character.
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Since coronavirus lockdown began in March, members of TikTok’s Glee community, many of whom were tweens and teens during the show’s original six-season run, sought comfort in the shared experience of revisiting the defining series of their adolescence and childhood. TikTok users had already been primed for Spence’s anti-Morrison campaign by an unexpected Glee resurgence during quarantine. Spence’s TikToks, she says, "just have such a pure hatred and rage in them that I think it kind of ignited that in everybody else who saw them." But why Matthew Morrison? "I definitely think she started the trend of the renaissance of Matthew Morrison hatred," explains Nicole Ciravolo, 22, an actor, screenwriter, and popular TikToker.
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(Spence has since posted nearly two dozen Morrison-related videos, including a three-part series in which she pretends to have been kidnapped by the actor and held hostage in his basement.) But Spence’s content succeeded not only because of her impressive commitment to the bit - that she really, really hates Matthew Morrison - but because her own amplified animosity toward the actor inspired a similar reaction in viewers, despite many of them not having come across Morrison’s work since Glee ended in 2015. The video went viral, landing 2.1 million views, breaking Spence’s previous channel record and creating an entirely new brand for her as The Girl Who Hates Matthew Morrison. “Stay dehydrated, you sick f*ck!” she screams over footage of herself blacking out Morrison’s face in a photograph. But Spence was so confident in the concept that she tried the format again three days later, this time sharing a reminder that everyone, other than Morrison of course, should drink water that day.
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The first video Spence posted about the actor - in which she ragefully declares everyone should have access to healthcare besides Morrison - didn’t initially resonate strongly with users. That’s when she came up with the concept of “an unspoken vendetta from me to him that he would never know about.” “I had this idea for a video where it seems really nice and I want well wishes for everyone except for him,” Spence recalls. Seeing Morrison’s headshot sparked an “instinctual repulsion” toward the actor, so the former Gleek decided to channel this into content.
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4 after coming across her dad’s playbill from Hairspray, in which Morrison originated the role of Link from 2002 through 2004. That all changed this fall when Matthew Morrison TikTok was officially - and somewhat unintentionally - founded by Carleigh Spence, a 24-year-old TikToker better known as a musical theater grad with 210,000 followers, posted her first Matthew Morrison video on Sept. But for the most part, the target of fans’ ire remained on the fictional character and the videos rarely circulated beyond the echo chamber of Glee TikTok.
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TikTok has always been home to a strong Glee community, one which has never shied away from taking aim at Morrison’s character, the breakdancing McKinley High glee club coach Will Schuester. So, how did we get here? And why is the internet so fixated on dunking on an actor whose most notable role ended when Obama was still in office? We spoke to the creators behind the anti-Matthew Morrison movement to find out how a meme gets made. As a result, Matthew Morrison TikTok quickly outgrew its irony-fueled corner of the internet and has started a glorified For You Page invasion, with Morrison content popping up on the feeds of users who aren’t even sure who this man is or why so many people seem to hate him. The Glee actor has become a beacon of derision on the platform over the past few months, and NBC’s announcement that Morrison would be returning to the screen in a live musical production of The Grinch was like throwing gasoline on the community’s already fiery roasts of the actor. Life amid COVID has been marked by isolation, but for a community on TikTok there's one thing that still unites them during this difficult year: hating Matthew Morrison.