Michael Urie, the TV sidekick who plays kings on stage

Michael Urie

Photo: MingleMediaTVNetwork / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 8, 1980 Houston, Texas
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Maestro, Single All the Way, Beverly Hills Chihuahua
Awards	Critics' Choice · Drama Desk (shared) · Drama Desk · Lucille Lortel · Theatre World · Clarence Derwent

On television, Michael Urie has spent most of his career standing one step to the side of the lead. He was the assistant who sharpened every insult his boss delivered in Ugly Betty, and he is the best friend who keeps Jason Segel‘s grieving therapist upright in Shrinking. On stage the order reverses. There he has carried a solo play for an entire evening and played two of Shakespeare’s doomed royals, Hamlet in Washington and Richard II off Broadway. The question his career keeps asking is whether the business that pays him so well to steal scenes will ever hand him the whole picture, and whether he needs it to.

Houston is where Urie was born, but Plano, the Dallas suburb his family moved to when he was a small child, is where he grew up and finished high school. He spent time at Collin County Community College before Juilliard accepted him into its Drama Division, where he won the school’s John Houseman Prize for classical theatre. The training shows in everything that followed: the comic timing people associate with him rests on a classical actor’s control of language.

The break came in 2006 with Ugly Betty. Urie was cast as Marc St. James, assistant to Vanessa Williams’s scheming magazine executive Wilhelmina Slater, in a part designed to rotate: the original idea was a different assistant every episode. Williams liked their chemistry, and midway through the first season he was signed as a series regular. He stayed until ABC ended the show in 2010. Marc was a vain, openly gay fashion assistant on prime-time network television, and this year, as the series approached its 20th anniversary, Urie looked back on it with a simple verdict: “We were way ahead of our time.”

Alongside the series and after it, he kept returning to the theatre. In The Temperamentals, off Broadway in 2010, he played the designer Rudi Gernreich in a story about the founders of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organisations in the United States, and won a Lucille Lortel Award and a Theatre World Award. In 2012 he made his Broadway debut as Bud Frump in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The defining stage role arrived a year later with Jonathan Tolins’s Buyer & Cellar, a one-man comedy about an out-of-work actor hired to staff the private shopping mall Barbra Streisand built in her basement. Urie played every character, won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance and the Clarence Derwent Award, and took the show on tour and to London’s Menier Chocolate Factory.

The following years ran on two tracks. On screen there was Partners, a CBS sitcom from the creators of Will & Grace that was cancelled in 2012 after six episodes aired, a recurring role as the literary agent Redmond in Younger, and a first feature as director, He’s Way More Famous Than You. On stage he was Arnold Beckoff in the revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, off Broadway and then on Broadway between 2018 and 2019, and Hamlet for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, a production he returned to in 2019. In 2021 Netflix cast him as the romantic lead of Single All the Way, a holiday romantic comedy built around a gay couple, with Jennifer Coolidge as his aunt.

The obvious objection to Urie’s screen career is that it keeps returning him to a type: the quick, warm, gay friend whose job is to react to someone else’s crisis. When television offered him the centre of a show, with Partners, it did not last. Brian in Shrinking is better written than most versions of that figure, a lawyer with his own marriage and his own doubts about becoming a father, but the architecture of the role is familiar. The stage has been where he tests whether he is more than that, and the tests do not always land cleanly. His Richard II for Red Bull Theater, a 2025 adaptation by Craig Baldwin set in 1980s Manhattan, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, yet most other reviewers came away divided, impressed by Urie and less sure about the concept around him.

Shrinking, which arrived on Apple TV in January 2023 with Segel and Harrison Ford, is the job that changed his standing. The second season gave Brian an adoption storyline with his husband, Charlie, and the performance won Urie the Critics’ Choice Television Award for best supporting actor in a comedy in February 2025. He was nominated for the Primetime Emmy in the same category that year and again in 2026; the 2026 award went to Stephen Root. The third season, which ran from January to April 2026, ended Brian and Charlie’s long wait by making them parents, and Apple renewed the series for a fourth season before the third had even premiered.

The theatre kept pace with the television. He played Sir Robin in the Broadway revival of Spamalot in 2023 and Prince Dauntless opposite Sutton Foster in Once Upon a Mattress, on Broadway in 2024 and then in Los Angeles, a performance that earned him a share of the 2025 Drama Desk Award for featured performance in a musical. On screen he played the choreographer Jerome Robbins in Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro and gave his voice to Hermes in the animated series Krapopolis. He has also narrated audiobooks, including Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, in which he voiced Marcellus, a captive octopus, work that reached the finals of the 2023 Audie Awards.

Urie, who was born on August 8, 1980 and graduated from Juilliard in 2003, has spoken publicly about being queer since 2010, and he has been with the actor and writer Ryan Spahn since 2008.

In July 2026 he went to London to play Mary’s Teacher in Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! at the Trafalgar Theatre, the role he had taken on Broadway the year before, fitting the two-week stint around production on the new season of Shrinking. One of those performances was filmed for a recorded release of the production. The next confirmed stop is Brian’s return in the fourth season, which Apple has not yet dated, and, if the pattern of the last twenty years holds, another stage role in between.