Idina Menzel questions whether she was too young to play Rachel's mom on Glee

“You know, you’re worried you’re not going to work again, and then people hire you to be someone’s mother when you probably should be their older sister,” the Frozen star recently told Stellar Magazine (via New York Post).

Menzel is only 15 years older than Michele and had just given birth to a child of her own (literally three months prior, per the same interview), so leaving behind her infant son to go sing dream duets with a 22-year-old who was supposed to be her long-lost teenage daughter was a little unnerving, to say the least.

“It just wasn’t great for the ego,” she continued. “But I sucked it up and sucked myself into my clothes, and was excited to work with Ryan Murphy and be a part of that hit show.” (Menzel was still breastfeeding at the time, and noted that she “couldn’t fit into any of the costumes.”)

Hollywood’s obsession with turning women into far-too-young mothers once they hit a certain age has been well documented, most recently in relation to Emmy Rossum being cast as Tom Holland’s mom in The Crowded Room, despite a less-than-ten-year age gap between the two. (Rossum did say that the casting “makes [sic] sense when I read the script,” for the record.)

Still, fans on X were quick to point out that the character Shelby was supposed to have served as a surrogate for Rachel’s dads when she was a teenager, so this particular age gap does make more sense than some other, more egregious examples. (For example, Nicole Kidman went from playing Alexander Skarsgård’s wife in 2017's Big Little Lies to his mother in The Northman just five years later. Shudder.)