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Lea Michele, a Varsity Debate Champ?! How She Started Prepping For Her New The Mayor Role in High School

Exclusive: Lea Michele dishes on learning political jargon for her new ABC comedy, The Mayor

By Tierney Bricker Oct 02, 2017 4:52 PMTags
Watch: Lea Michele Gives Scoop on New Show "The Mayor"

 So long, ballads; hello, ballots!

 The Mayor, ABC's new sitcom which won our vote for the best new series of the fall, centers on Brandon Michael Hall as a young rapper who stages a mayoral campaign as a stunt…but then is shocked to learn he's actually elected. Fortunately, he has his former-classmate-turned-chief-of-staff Valentina (Lea Michele) to guide him, which means lots of political jargon for the Glee and Scream Queens star as her character is "obsessed with politics." 

"Right now with everything going on in the world, I think watching the news sometimes is incredibly difficult," Lea Michele recently told E! News, "but I've definitely had to brush up on my legal jargon...and it's been a lot of fun." 

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And Michele, 31, admitted to using some of her dialogue on The Mayor to her advantage in her everyday conversations, saying, "You learn a couple of key facts and then insert them when necessary to make yourself seem smarter than you actually are!"

But funnily enough, Michele's new role as Val is actually a lot closer to what she wanted to be than Glee's Rachel Berry when she was growing up. 

"I wanted to be a lawyer growing up," Michele revealed. "I was on the debate team. I was varsity debate...major champion, I won lots of awards for it, and I was like, maybe this is what I want do to, but then I kept doing this, which is definitely what I think I should be doing!"

And being huge fans of Glee, Scream Queens and now The Mayor, we're not going to debate her on that.

To hear more from Lea about The Mayor, press play on the video above. 

The Mayor premieres Tuesday, Oct. 3 at 9:30 p.m. on ABC.