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Ever since landing the career-making role of gay assistant/fashionista Marc St. James on “Ugly Betty” — at 25, just three years out of Juilliard — Michael Urie has been a busy, award-winning actor unbridled by being unabashedly out. Over the last 20 years, he’s glided between TV (“Modern Family,” “The Good Wife,” “Younger”), film (“Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” “Single All the Way,” “Maestro”) and Broadway (“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” “Torch Song,” “Once Upon a Mattress”).
“Whatever I’m currently doing is my favorite,” says the 44-year-old over video chat from the Manhattan apartment he shares with partner and fellow actor Ryan Spahn. “I find the work itself feels the same. Working on a scene with Harrison Ford is not that different than being onstage with Sutton Foster. I’m opposite somebody at the top of their game, who knows this medium better than anyone, and they’re treating me like a peer. I’m there and it’s thrilling.”
Ford is just one of the many “titans” Urie feels he’s surrounded by on his latest big gig, Apple TV+’s “Shrinking,” where he plays attorney Brian, gay bestie to star Jason Segel’s Jimmy, a straight, unorthodox psychotherapist struggling with the loss of his wife and raising his teen daughter on his own.
The actor and co-creator plays a therapist grieving the loss of his wife on the Apple TV+ series. Sounds sad, but the show blends high and low comedy with weighty themes and melancholic moments.
Segel, who co-created the series with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, describes Urie’s audition tape as electric and flawless. “[Michael’s] not a guy who’s showing up and figuring it out on the day,” he says of Urie’s “exceptional” prep work. “Like a pinch hitter or an assassin, he comes in and just perfectly executes the assignment of every scene.”
Segel notes that the spot-on work Urie delivered during the first season convinced the show’s creative team he could shoulder the dramatic heft of what was planned for the second. In it, Brian tells Jimmy’s daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), how and why he has befriended the guilt-ridden drunk driver (Goldstein) who killed her mother — which, two episodes later, he repeats nearly verbatim to Jimmy, leading to much-needed catharsis all-around.
The intense scenes were “a huge, huge challenge I was so up for and so game to do,” Urie says, and “easily the greatest gift anyone’s ever given me in television.”
“He’s just the best dude,” says Segel. “It makes you want to write for [him]. It makes you want to see him thrive.”
Given his success, it’s hard to believe Urie almost didn’t pursue acting professionally. Born to a seamstress mom and an oil industry draftsman dad in Houston but raised in Dallas-adjacent Plano alongside his older sister, Laura — a Bay Area psychologist who loves “Shrinking” — he liked performing in plays as a teen but says, “I didn’t think anything like this was at all possible.” He wanted to be a filmmaker like his idol, Tim Burton, or maybe a high school drama teacher like those he worshiped along the way.
Michael Urie. (The Tyler Twins / For The Times)
All that changed when he entered a Texas-wide poetry reading competition as a high school senior. In the middle of a seven-minute piece interpreted in an appropriately serious manner, Urie elicited unexpected giggles from the audience. “In the moment, I started to lean into everything they were finding funny,” he remembers, “and I kept getting bigger and bigger laughs.”
If walking away with that state championship made Urie seriously consider giving acting a shot, getting into Juilliard after auditioning on a whim made him believe he might succeed. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God! This is where Robin Williams, Patti LuPone, William Hurt and Kevin Kline went to school,’” he recalls. “Suddenly, I’m in the club.”
Urie’s certainly made the most of that membership, and he remains thankful to have been given opportunities to bring so many shades of gay to LGBTQ+ audiences throughout the world. But “Shrinking” has seriously broadened his brand. “I’m being stopped on the street by more straight men than ever,” he reveals. “It’s empowering. What I feel is pride that all these straight men like Brian and think of him as their friend.”
The actor’s approach to one scene was so different than the writers expected—including her showrunner husband—that they rewrote the course of her character’s story.
In Season 3, currently shooting in Los Angeles, Urie’s Brian and his TV husband, Charlie (Devin Kawaoka), will tackle co-parenting their newly adopted child. “It’s not just the baby,” says Urie, resisting a gender reveal so as to not ruin the surprise. “It’s what the baby means to people around him: Charlie, the biological mother and Liz (Christa Miller). And how [being a] dad fits into the rest of his life, in these friendships, in this chosen family. So far, they’ve written big comedy and some super serious pathos.”
Which is exactly as Urie likes it. Shocked and flattered by the growing Emmy buzz surrounding his Season 2 turn, he’d clearly be thrilled to win yet confesses he long ago gave up on accumulating awards. “All I really wanna do is work,” he says. “I’m way more comfortable on a set, in rehearsal or onstage than I am at a podium or on a red carpet.”
From the Oscars to the Emmys.
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