Ever since touchdown the career-making function of homosexual assistant/fashionista Marc St. James on “Ugly Betty” — at 25, simply three years out of Juilliard — Michael Urie has been a busy, award-winning actor unbridled by being unabashedly out. Over the past 20 years, he’s glided between TV (“Modern Family,” “The Good Wife,” “Younger”), movie (“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 condominium he shares with accomplice 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 simply one of many many “titans” Urie feels he’s surrounded by on his newest large gig, Apple TV+’s “Shrinking,” the place he performs lawyer Brian, homosexual bestie to star Jason Segel’s Jimmy, a straight, unorthodox psychotherapist combating the lack of his spouse and elevating his teen daughter on his personal.
Segel, who co-created the collection with Invoice Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, describes Urie’s audition tape as electrical 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 throughout the first season satisfied the present’s artistic staff he might shoulder the dramatic heft of what was deliberate 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 mom — which, two episodes later, he repeats almost verbatim to Jimmy, resulting in much-needed catharsis all-around.
Michael Urie in “Shrinking” Season 2.
(Apple TV+)
The extraordinary scenes had been “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 onerous to imagine Urie nearly didn’t pursue performing professionally. Born to a seamstress mother and an oil trade draftsman dad in Houston however raised in Dallas-adjacent Plano alongside his older sister, Laura — a Bay Space psychologist who loves “Shrinking” — he appreciated performing in performs as a teen however says, “I didn’t think anything like this was at all possible.” He wished to be a filmmaker like his idol, Tim Burton, or perhaps a highschool drama instructor like these he worshiped alongside the best way.
Michael Urie. (The Tyler Twins / For The Instances)
All that modified when he entered a Texas-wide poetry studying competitors as a highschool senior. In the midst of a seven-minute piece interpreted in an appropriately severe method, Urie elicited surprising giggles from the viewers. “In the moment, I started to lean into everything they were finding funny,” he remembers, “and I kept getting bigger and bigger laughs.”
If strolling away with that state championship made Urie critically take into account giving performing a shot, entering into Juilliard after auditioning on a whim made him imagine he may succeed. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God! This is where Robin Williams, Patti LuPone, William Hurt and Kevin Kline went to school,’” he recollects. “Suddenly, I’m in the club.”
Urie’s actually made probably the most of that membership, and he stays grateful to have been given alternatives to deliver so many shades of homosexual to LGBTQ+ audiences all through the world. However “Shrinking” has critically broadened his model. “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.”
In Season 3, at present taking pictures in Los Angeles, Urie’s Brian and his TV husband, Charlie (Devin Kawaoka), will deal with co-parenting their newly adopted baby. “It’s not just the baby,” says Urie, resisting a gender reveal in order to not wreck the shock. “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 precisely as Urie likes it. Shocked and flattered by the rising Emmy buzz surrounding his Season 2 flip, he’d clearly be thrilled to win but confesses he way back 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.”
