Michael Urie’s Big Gay Journey From ‘Ugly Betty’ to ‘Spamalot’ on Broadway

When it comes to how to best wear a wig on Broadway, a performer could probably do no better than being coached by the legendary Harvey Fierstein. It’s akin to being taught how to properly poach an egg by Martha Stewart, how to write a taut thriller by Stephen King, or how to be hot by Ryan Gosling. Wigs, comedy, and Broadway: Fierstein’s advice would be like getting counsel from God, and actor Michael Urie has had that spiritual experience.

Urie is known to TV fans for roles in ABC’s Ugly Betty and Apple TV+’s Shrinking. Theater fans are obsessed with his performances off-Broadway in critically hailed plays like The Temperamentals and Buyer and Cellar and on the Great White Way in How to Succeed Without Really Trying and Chicken and Biscuits. He can also be seen playing famed choreographer Jerry Robbins in Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, which is now on Netflix.

Star Wonders How Many ‘Gay Plays’ Broadway Can Sustain?Onwards

Tim Teeman, Katie Baker

Any good actor knows the greatest role they could play is that of a sponge, especially when given the good fortune to be within the glow radius of a diva’s halo. Urie learned that early on, playing Marc St. James on Ugly Betty, an assistant to a fashion magazine maven played by Vanessa Williams, his mentor and friend in all things fabulous, hilarious, and generous.

In 2018 Urie starred in the Broadway revival of Torch Song, a new mounting of the seminal LGBT play Torch Strong Trilogy originally written and performed by the raspy-voiced, boisterous genius Harvey Fierstein in 1982. Urie was brilliant, bringing a bouncy levity to material that is as uproarious as it is devastating—and, befitting his presence in the Fierstein glow, properly sponge-like, soaking in every anecdote and bit of advice. One tip in particular is coming in handy, now that Urie is starring in the first Broadway revival of the Spamalot, the Tony-winning musical based on the classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“He said: ‘Don’t play to the wig,” Urie tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. It’s wisdom that was bestowed to Fierstein by director Jack O’Brien when Fierstein was in previews for his blockbuster turn as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. The advice has now become somewhat a thespian’s heirloom, passed down through generations of gay actors as they don outlandish hairpieces in the name of broad comedy, with Urie taking the words to heart as he plays Sir Robin in Spamalot. “The wig is doing it for you,” he says. “You don’t have to play to the wig. It’s a good note! When you’re wearing a wig and not used to it, you want to play it up. Let the wig do the work.”

In Spamalot, King Arthur assembles his knights of the round table, a more hapless, motley crew than one might remember from Camelot lore. At the encouragement of God and the diva-voiced Lady of the Lake (Leslie Kritzer, rocket-launching the roof off the St. James Theater each night), the knights embark on a mission to find the Holy Grail, encountering a host of bonkers distractions on the way: the not-yet dead, Knights Who Say Ni, effeminate princes, killer rabbits, and Frenchmen who fart in their general direction.

Urie’s Sir Robin is a sight. His sweet, semi-clueless disposition is a blank slate onto which punchlines and mugging can contort as the Monty Python material demands, a canvas of comedy framed by a wiry, shoulder-length blonde wig. At various times in the show, Urie resembles a somewhat androgynous nymph, an Afghan hound, or your dear Aunt Linda. That Sir Robin is so pure as to not be at all self-conscious about how ludicrous he looks in that wig is its own punchline, with Urie weaponizing that naivete for the show’s most cutting, provocative bits.

It’s Urie who has the audience giggling nervously as Sir Robin launches into the full-scale, stop-the-show production number, “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway,” about how no mounting of a musical will work without the involvement of “the Jews.” (Sample verse: “You may have butch men by the score / Whom the audience adore / You may even have some animals from zoos / Though you've Poles and Krauts instead / You may have unleavened bread / But I tell you, you are dead / If you don't have any Jews.”) That audience nervousness—those lyrics, in this climate?!—quickly abates as Urie has everyone eating out of his hand, as if he’s serving a buffet of laughter, by the time the Fiddler on the Roof bottle dance parody gets delighted mid-song applause.

The revival, which officially opened Nov. 16, has been hovering near $1 million in grosses throughout the holiday season, after earning enthusiastic reviews. “If you’re a Python fan of yore, it is like having a very familiar set of nerve endings and laughter prompts reactivated,” The Daily Beast’s Tim Teeman wrote in his review. “The musical remains a daffy, rollicking night out. The final confetti canon—a Broadway staple, and often a last desperate roll of the dice in any show—here feels absolutely perfect.”

“The Monty Python fans are there,” Urie says about the show’s energetic audiences. “The theater fans are there. It’s one of those great musicals that, like, straight guys like.” We both laughed—this was something I planned to ask him about. “It’s uniform. They all like it! Leslie Kritzer’s in it, so the gays like it. It’s a musical, so women like it. And it’s Monty Python comedy. It’s hard to imagine not finding these things funny. It’s kind of—I don’t want to say foolproof, because I don’t want to jinx it. But our job is just don’t screw it up.”

In fact, the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” approach is to the extent that Urie is even wearing the costume created for original Sir Robin, David Hyde Pierce, in 2005. A few days before our conversation, the Spamalot wardrobe department was trying to fit a hat on Urie. “I was like, my head is way bigger than this hat.” They flipped it upside down to see if the size could be adjusted, when Urie noticed the label: “This was David Hyde Pierce’s hat!”

Urie and I met at the Westway Diner on 9th Avenue in Times Square. After a lively, slightly tortured back and forth over whether to include the stuffing and the mashed potatoes as side dishes, Urie ordered the broiled chicken meal. (“Kill the stuffing!” was the final decree, delivered with the gusto befitting a Knight of the Round Table.) It was a fitting Thanksgiving dinner, as days after we talked, Urie performed with the Spamalot cast at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He rehearsed for that earlier in the day, then had dance rehearsals, lighting blocking, and a full in-costume photo shoot, before going to the gym during the break before that night’s preview performance. “I just realized how much I am very hungry,” he said. “Maybe I should have gotten the stuffing.”

“Did you know this is where Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David came up with Seinfeld?” he asks, before second-guessing himself, then convincing himself he was right—before we both wondered how many Manhattan diners attempted to claim that piece of pop-culture history. A Google search after dinner confirmed this where the duo hatched the idea for Seinfeld. No legendary sitcoms were born of our conversation; instead, we chatted about people’s weird internet behavior, the evolution of gay TV characters, and how perfect and fun our respective nieces and nephews are. (In hindsight, the amount of our dinner that last topic took up should merit some forthcoming Uncle of the Year awards.)

A lifelong fan of musicals, Urie would listen to cast recordings growing up and keep track of roles he felt like he could feasibly pull off one day. “I’m not really a dancer. I can’t just go to open calls and audition for musicals. I always think if you can sing the National Anthem, you’re a singer. If you can’t, you’re not. And I can’t. I would never even try.”

We teased him about how we’ll remember this when one day we turn on a New York Mets game or something like that and hear him announced as that game’s National Anthem singer. “I was asked once to sing it somewhere, and I was like, absolutely not!” he says. “And I hate to say no to anything.”

Urie first saw Spamalot during the production’s original West End run in London, where his Ugly Betty co-star Alan Dale was playing King Arthur. “When I saw Robin, I was like, I can sing that. That’s not that hard to sing. That was the first thing that attracted me to the part: I could do it,” he says, laughing. (Punctuation when you’re talking to Michael Urie tends to come in the form of a very addictive, brief giggle.)

Fast-forward about 15 years, and Urie was cast as Sir Robin in the Kennedy Center’s sold-out run this spring in Washington, D.C., before heading to Broadway. “Now I have a great musical number that I’m at the center of, and I have this fabulous blonde wig.”

“‘Ugly Betty’ was such a perfect experience”

Michael Urie’s Ugly Betty casting is one of Hollywood’s best “big break” stories.

After graduating from Julliard (in the same class as Jessica Chastain and Luke Macfarlane), he auditioned for a “co-star” role in the series’ pilot, described in the breakdown as, merely, “bitchy, gay assistant.” (“I was like, I bet I could get that,” Urie once recalled to Vanity Fair.)

The part —and Urie’s employment—was meant to be disposable, but Vanessa Williams, who Urie was acting against, saw potential in their chemistry, requested that writers beef up his role, and, eventually, his Marc St. James was a key player in the show’s ensemble—and a pivotal character when it came to queer representation on TV at the time.

“That job was because of someone else’s generosity,” he tells me, his mind still blown that an icon like Vanessa Williams is such a huge part of his career journey. “It wasn’t just that she was being generous. It was that she saw something in us together. She saw that we could be good together. It was savvy of her to say, ‘What if we were a pair? What else can we do?’”

He laughs now because, on that day of shooting, he says, “I thought I was going to get fired. I was mimicking her behind her, and someone told her. ‘Do you know what that queen’s doing behind you? Imitating you.’ And she comes over to me and says, ‘I hear you’re doing me behind me. What else can I do that you can do?’”

If you watched any of Urie’s performances, you know that his eyes are an actor’s gift, capable of twitching manically, playfully, or even villainously. They are exactly the shape and dexterity that God intended for a person to perform the perfect exaggerated, exasperated eye roll. They also act as headlights of empathy, beaming a pathos capable of breaking your heart as nimbly as they are at cracking you up.

That combination is what’s made Urie’s casting in TV and film projects so thrilling ever since he won over so many fans with his performance on Ugly Betty, on which bitchy line readings had never been funnier, and a so-called comic relief character’s journey to accept his own identity more profound. (As Marc, he got to come out to Patti LuPone, who played his mother, and make audiences weep while doing it.)

That juggling act—a recognition that a gay man can be funny, maybe a little flamboyant, and also human—was a highlight of the Netflix holiday movie Single All the Way, which was met with a veritable Pride Parade of enthusiasm for being the rare holiday rom-com with gay lead characters. Now, he’s doing the same on Shrinking, which he calls “a very adult show, which is very exciting.”

Shrinking is Urie’s first regular TV role in 10 years. On the series, he plays Brian, the lawyer best friend to Jason Segel’s grieving therapist, Jimmy, in a cast that includes Harrison Ford. In Season 1, which was just nominated for a Critics Choice Award for Best Comedy Series, Brian grapples with the anxieties of his job and his own mental health as he gets ready to marry his fiancé, Charlie (Devin Kawaoka), and rebuilds his relationship with his father (Brian Howe). The path from the massive success of Ugly Betty to another celebrated show like Shrinking was hardly direct or easy—it rarely is in Hollywood, even for a fan-favorite actor from a groundbreaking, beloved network hit.

“Ugly Betty was such a perfect experience,” he says. “I mean, I wish we would have went a little longer, but it was such a perfect experience. We all were so prepared for the next stages of our careers because of it. I think about shows—they don’t really exist as much anymore—but where the characters are all the same kind of person, like Friends or How I Met Your Mother. No two characters were alike on Ugly Betty. Nor are they on Shrinking. There’s no competition, there’s no envy. We all have our specialties, and in our lanes are all these perfect little unicorns inside.”

On Ugly Betty, “there were a lot of us who were making our big break,” he adds. “And then there were several who were major, huge famous people, like Vanessa Williams. We had TV legend Judith Light. We had Tony Plana, who had been on every show in the ’80s and ’90s. We had America Ferrera, who was a brilliant leader and shot to stardom. It was the perfect way to learn what Hollywood, what fame is like. So that when it was over, I think we were all so strong. I was like, ‘Well if I never get back on a television show in a regular way, I’ve had that.’ I’m sure I would have been disappointed to not get back on TV. But I didn't have any expectations, because I had just a perfect experience. The business is so up and down. When you've had such an up, and then had some downs too. Right after Ugly Betty I had a major down. And I think that was just as beneficial to me as the major up.”

When Ugly Betty ended, the summer Urie turned 30, he was cast in the Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business WIthout Really Trying. “I was like, this is perfect. This is the perfect job to follow Ugly Betty. I’ll do a Broadway musical. I’ll do it for a year. It will be a hit. And it was one of the shows that I saw as a kid and I said I could play that part.”

He was right—the show, which cast Daniel Radcliffe as the lead and would eventually have Nick Jonas and Darren Criss as replacements, was a bonafide smash. But Urie would end up having to wait a year before taking the stage. While his initial casting as Bud Frump had supposedly been finalized, there was one rights holder who wasn’t in the room when Urie did his reading. He was forced to re-audition, and lost the part.

He never found out why this one person didn’t want him to open the show. (The role eventually went to Christopher J. Hanke.) But when it was time to cast replacements, that person was no longer involved. The producers reached out to Urie again and offered him the role, without any new audition or directive to play Frump any differently than he had during that first casting round.

“That was 14 years ago. I’m very lucky to have that happen that early in my career,” Urie says. “Some people, their big breaks are later, or their big disappointments are earlier. To have had it in that order, when I was that young was a major lesson.”

Back on Broadway in Spamalot, a production as huge and expensive as How to Succeed was all those years ago is a full circle moment, as is the fact that, thanks to streaming, Ugly Betty is still a part of the zeitgeist now, with a new generation of viewers as it was 17 years ago when it premiered. Because he meets so many people who have been so deeply affected by Marc’s arc on the show, the potential for that kind of impact with the characters he plays weighs on Urie’s mind—even if he’s not specifically seeking that kind of resonant project out.

“Especially on TV, we can't go back. I can’t, and I certainly don’t want to go back,” he says. “Shrinking is a super straight show. The most straight people I've ever worked with in my life.” Urie uncoils with laughter as he says this.

“When it came my way, I was like, I don’t know where I fit in this very hetero world, but I’m interested,” he continues. “I think the stories that we’ve done so far have been forward-moving. We’re still dealing with the traumas that gay people go through. Brian’s happy-go-lucky attitude is masking something from his formidable years. But I’m really proud of the way that the writers have thought ahead… I feel like to be an adult show, to be a show about mental health, to be a gay character on that show who is dealing with his own adult mental health and looking back on his traumas with characters who are mental health professionals, is really cool.”

At this point, I realize that I’ve monopolized so much of our conversation talking about Urie’s experience as an out gay actor. (He publicly came out during the final season of Ugly Betty.) It’s one of those things where, personally, Ugly Betty premiered at a foundational time for me, as it did for many gay millennials who were discovering how to be comfortable with their identity. I’ve followed Urie’s career religiously since, and admired the range of queer characters he’s played on screen and on stage. The questions come from a place of genuine curiosity, but there’s also an insecurity that forcing a gay actor to always talk about gay issues might be invasive or reductive; no one’s asking Jason Segel about his experience as a straight actor every time he gives an interview.

“It can be daunting. I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing sometimes. But I’m lucky that I've had great mentors,” Urie says, mentioning the writers of Ugly Betty, the playwrights behind The Temperamentals and Buyer and Cellar, and, of course, Harvey Fierstein. “These guys helped me get smarter and get savvier. And that generation is different than our generation.”

He remembers Fierstein talking to him about how, when Torch Song Trilogy was first staged in the ’80s, there were people involved in the production who were afraid of doing the play.

“There were people who were actually like, ‘This could be dangerous.’ Not just career wise. Like ‘we could leave the theater and get beat up,’” Urie says. “When we did the play, we didn't feel that way. It was a victory lap for us. I look at the younger generation. I had to come out, and everyone has to come out, of course. But it's totally different for them. In the way that it was totally different for me than it is for Harvey. I’m not like Harvey at all. Harvey was a pioneer. Harvey was loud, proud, and unforgiving. I’m none of those things.”

Urie recalls that, being an aspiring actor who grew up amidst the conservative social attitudes of Houston, Texas, his initial career aspiration was to “pass”—to not be obviously seen as gay, presumably to get more opportunities. “But I got typecast, which was great for me, because I got cast. What I didn’t know when Ugly Betty was first on TV was whether I would work again. I didn’t know if anybody would ever want to hire me again. There were people who would advise me to not do more gay characters. Of course, that’s crazy because I wouldn’t have worked. And that implies there's only one kind of gay character, when there’s so many.”

So he understands why people—be it journalists or fans—are so fascinated by his experience in the industry, especially now as he enters a new phase of his career, starring on Broadway and in an “adult show” like Shrinking. But there is a caveat.

“What I don’t love is when people ask me what my coming out was like, my coming out story,” he says. “It’s ultimately boring, and I always feel when I get to the end of it, they wanted something more. Like, sorry that it wasn’t more fun. Or less fun. Whatever you wanted it to be. More dramatic, or more perfect. So I stopped telling it when people ask.”

Why is that?

“Because I come out every day,” he continues. “We all come out constantly when you’re not straight. But I have no intention of not playing queer characters. I’m always looking for others. I want to play straight characters, too. I’m also really proud that anything I’ve done moves anyone. When we were doing The Temperamentals, this person I know brought her teenage son to see the show. After the show, he came out to her, and she popped a bottle of champagne. It’s not just Ugly Betty. It’s every time we get to play these characters.”