VIDEO – Lea Michele (Sarfati) sang on Sally Jesse Raphael as a kid

Long before Lea Michele became the star of Glee, she was a hardworking showbiz kid who strutted her stuff on Broadway, and Sally Jesse Raphael.

She appeared on the 1995 episode “I’m a Kid & Already a Star!” because of her success in Broadway plays like Les Misérables and Ragtime. She sang “Castle on a Cloud” from Les Mis:

Lea appears on the cover of Nylon Magazine this month where she talks about her insane work ethic as a child:

“I was a weird kid. I was eight years old saying ‘I don’t want a day off. I’d like to work every day, please.'”

She also revealed a desire to make her audience uncomfortable:

“I feel like I’m the type of person who likes to shock people a little bit, too. For example, when I was in Spring Awakening (before her Glee fame), every night I had to do this nude scene. I always loved to find the one person in the audience who I knew was going to be uncomfortable, who throughout the show was cringing in their seat, and when [co-star] Jonathan Groff would undo my top, I loved it! I was like, ‘Take that!! How uncomfortable are you right now? I want you to be uncomfortable!’”

Lea revealed that she’s over trying to prove anything to anyone too:

“I think I got hit with some pretty hard things at the beginning that were not good representations of my personality, and people put a label–I think they like to do that–and it really got to me.”