Michael Urie's Big Gay Revolution - Vanity Fair
Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood's greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Michael Urie takes us from Juilliard to Ugly Betty to his new Apple TV+ comedy, Shrinking, a journey he likens to "growing up."
Michael Urie has played a lot of gay guys. On TV, in Emmy-winning hits like Ugly Betty and Modern Family, and on Broadway, from major revivals (Torch Song) to hot premieres (Grand Horizons). As the out-and-proud lead of a sinfully sweet rom-com, in Netflix's Single All the Way, and as a closeted historical figure in an Oscar-tipped biopic, Bradley Cooper's upcoming Maestro. When he was first starting out as an actor, Urie, who identifies as queer, would be warned of getting "pigeonholed" in such parts. He was told he needed to branch out from the gay guy. But if you've seen his work in these projects, you know his range. You know the breadth of his characters. You know his secret sauce.
Take Shrinking, his first regular main role on a series in more than a decade. Urie calls the Apple TV+ dramedy "adult," and he means a lot by that. He's acting opposite film stars in Jason Segel and Harrison Ford, and has the backing of a mega-streamer as well as a powerful showrunner, that being Ted Lasso's Bill Lawrence. He's portraying a prickly lawyer negotiating an estranged friendship, an impending marriage, and several professional headaches. Oh, and having made his name in mostly LGBTQ-targeted projects, he's now meeting a whole new audience. "I'm recognized by totally different people than I used to be—a lot of straight people, a lot of men," he says. "When I look back and I see that I'm in this show that's almost all straight people, and I'm the queer element…there's a part of me that feels like I've bridged this gap of visibility, and I've been allowed to grow up in it."
Urie takes pride in that career arc—that of a working actor who's stayed true to who he is and found great variety within that, who's been challenged by the pressures of his industry without ever succumbing to them. He's witnessed what can happen when you stick it out, and things finally start to change.
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Just before graduating from Juilliard in 2003, Urie says, he performed in a show for the famed arts conservatory and cracked the audience up. He was funny—really funny—and caught the eye of a manager nabbing talent from his class (which also included Jessica Chastain and Luke Macfarlane). The manager took Urie out for coffee and told him he could almost see Robin Williams, a comedy legend in waiting, but that he needed a tad more convincing to sign him. Urie pitched himself as someone who could do it all. "He stopped me and he was like, 'See, that hand gesture? Just not sure,'" Urie recalls, acting out the scene for me over Zoom. "It was obvious what he was getting at was, You're a homo. That's what he meant. That's what he said." They went their separate ways.
Hiding was not exactly an option for Urie, even though few actors were publicly out at the time. In the transition from student to professional, he wasn't auditioning for, say, Law and Order—the typical entry-level New York stuff. He attracted a "really good" agent and manager who found him a specific lane. "They saw Sean Hayes," Urie says. There was a model for that in a Sean." (Will & Grace was at the height of its popularity around this time.) Within a year of graduating, Urie played a gay best friend in a filmed pilot, which put him on the sitcom radar. While doing a basement play, he bumped into the casting director for Ugly Betty, who was impressed; he decided to audition on that pilot for a mere "costar" credit (as in, below "guest star") that Urie says paid about $3,000. "There was a character [description] that just said, 'bitchy, gay assistant,' and I was like, I bet I could get that," Urie says.
Starring America Ferrera as the gawky new hire at a fashion magazine, the flashy ABC series was picked up, with Urie's Marc St. James swiftly welcomed into the core ensemble. The initial plan for Vanessa Williams's imperious Wilhelmina Slater was to give her a different assistant every episode, but Williams herself pushed for Urie to stay on, enamored with their tart chemistry from the pilot. Urie's trajectory kept taking off from there: The show was a critical darling, then a ratings success, then a prized Emmy winner; over four seasons, Urie was a sassy standout while given the room to go darker and deeper, as when Marc told his unaccepting mom, played by Patti LuPone, to get out of his life forever.
Urie finished out his 20s on Ugly Betty and was thrust into a national spotlight. He did not come out until the end of its run, fending off tabloid-driven speculation throughout. Questions about his private life flooded in. "One time I was on a red carpet and someone said to me, 'So are you out?'—not even, 'Are you gay?'" Urie says. "And then this person put a microphone in my face, and I was like, 'I don't talk about my personal life.'" Urie says the outlet then printed the entire interaction, and can still remember reading it in full, descriptions of him "hemming and hawing." As he was finishing Ugly Betty, he was advised that this would be it, in a sense—that it was time to look beyond gay roles: "I wasn't told to stay in the closet, but I certainly wasn't encouraged to come out."
The decision to come out, then, resulted from those "pigeonholing" warnings not panning out. He'd done a play during Ugly Betty, starring as another gay guy in fashion, but the character was totally different from the one with which he was making his name. He saw opportunity within the niche. "I was like, 'Forget this—I'm not going to do this,'" he says. "And even when I came out, it was very quiet. Nobody cared because nobody thought differently."
Urie was cast in the Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying right after Ugly Betty finished, primed to make his big debut on the Great White Way. This was the summer he was turning 30. His breakout was past and his future was bright. This was his whole identity. Then, abruptly, Urie says, he was forced to reaudition; a rights holder hadn't approved his casting, even though it was supposedly finalized. He ultimately lost the part. "That was really, really devastating because suddenly this role was taken from me—when it went away, I didn't know who I was anymore," Urie says. "That taught me, 'Don't ever let a show or a job—any single job or even a career—become my identity because it can totally rip your heart out.'" (In a wild twist of fate, Urie ended up joining that revival a year later opposite Nick Jonas, as they replaced opening-night cast members Christopher J. Hanke and Daniel Radcliffe, respectively.)
Urie talks about this experience as transformative—"the best thing that could've happened to me because it was so horrible." He adopted an industry savvy and a level head, even as more disappointments followed. In 2012, he starred in Partners, an old-fashioned multicamera sitcom from the Will & Grace creators that CBS yanked from the schedule after just a handful of episodes. "I remember us trying to breathe above water with that show and noticing, Oh, we're all just trying to do what we think they want to keep us on the air." He says the cast was doing a table read when Deadline published the announcement that they were canceled: "Literally, Deadline knew before we knew. That was weird and cruel and really gross, awful and sad and brutal."
A funny thing happened after that—no pun intended. Urie started popping up everywhere on TV as a show-stopping funnyman. Before Partners, he'd never guest starred in anything. Suddenly he was hanging with the ladies of Hot in Cleveland, introducing viewers to the "Gayborhood" on Workaholics, and coldly bossing around Sarah Hyland on Modern Family. He spied for the NSA on The Good Wife and then The Good Fight. From its second year on, Younger booked him on every season as the literary agent with a penchant for making the lives of Liza (Sutton Foster), Kelsey (Hilary Duff), et al. ever-so-slightly worse. He became like family to the show, both for viewers—each chaos-inducing appearance should bring a wider grin to your face—and the ensemble. "That's probably the happiest set I've ever guested on," Urie says. He could count on it every year—crucial for an actor settling out of the cozy series-regular life, and into the gig economy that defines the world of the recurring.
But Urie made a name for himself onstage during this period too. Right after the Partners debacle, he got the chance to take on a one-man play by one of that sitcom's writers, Jonathan Tolins: Buyer & Cellar, which was conceived as a vehicle for Modern Family's Jesse Tyler Ferguson. Due to that star's unavailability, Urie stepped in, portraying a struggling gay actor recently fired from Disneyland and newly employed by Barbra Streisand, and delivered a searingly tragicomic performance across more than 600 shows, between off off Broadway, off Broadway, on tour, in London, and most recently during the height of COVID, in his apartment. The production won him a Drama Desk Award, and set him up for a robust New York stage career. As Urie sums it up with a laugh, "My TV show got canceled, and I got Buyer & Cellar because Jesse Tyler Ferguson's TV show didn't get canceled."
We've seen a few especially new sides to Urie lately. Who knew he'd make such a swoony, affecting romantic lead in Single All the Way, the historic gay rom-com that launched as a mainstream hit on Netflix? And then there's Shrinking, in which Urie's "gay best friend" part is about as far as you can get from the one he played in that pilot 20 years ago. His Brian is wounded and spiky and sharp, terrified of the future while diving into it headfirst all the same. And yes, as Urie likes to say, he's very grown-up.
These roles build on one another. They reveal new shades of a persona, new depths of one's talent. I've caught Urie at a busy moment on this particular Friday evening. "I just finished shooting this movie the other day in LA with Michael Keaton, and now I'm rehearsing a musical, Spamalot, for the Kennedy Center, and on Monday I'm cohosting the New York Pops gala honoring Barry Manilow," he says. "And then I get to go back to work with Harrison Ford! It's like—this is the kid who Vanessa Williams gave a shot to."
Sometimes Urie wonders how his career would've turned out if he was straight. Would he be a bigger star, or maybe have his own sitcom that actually, you know, lasted? What would've happened if he'd just stopped playing queer roles, as he was so directly advised to during a crucial professional turning point? He's not asking out of wistfulness or regret, just curiosity. He doesn't know what he'd want in those situations, anyway. He only knows that he's gotten more than he could've imagined in this situation, the one life put him in. After all, no one has had a career like Michael Urie. That makes it trailblazing, for one thing, but also dynamic, bumpy, and admirably defiant. And yeah, totally gay.
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