You may not think about Singin’ in the Rain or Blazing Saddles while watching Shrinking — but Michael Urie definitely does while he’s making it.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Warner Bros. lot — it’s a magical place,” Urie tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. After three seasons of shooting Shrinking around Los Angeles as well as the Warner Bros. lot, Urie now watches the classic movies filmed there and thinks, “I know that path! I know that angle!”
Urie, 45, is clearly not the only person who feels at home on the set of Shrinking. After years of saying that the show had a three-season arc, Bill Lawrence — who co-created the Apple TV series alongside Brett Goldstein and star Jason Segel — announced earlier this year that Shrinking will in fact be back for a fourth season. “My god, we were thrilled,” Urie says of the moment Lawrence told the cast, probably earlier than he was supposed to. “We were starting to figure it out at the end of season three, and I started to get wind that they’ve got an idea for how to keep the show going. And then Bill was like, ‘It’s pretty much gonna happen.’ He loves to break news.”
So Urie will now return for a fourth season of playing Brian, the best friend of Segel’s Jimmy, who over the course of the show, becomes integrated into the lives of all the other main characters (a hallmark of Bill Lawrence: Every show eventually becomes a hangout show). Season three found Brian raising a child with his husband, Charlie (Devin Kawaoka), and though Urie says everyone tells him Brian is a textbook narcissist, at the end of the third season, Brian makes what is, for him, a remarkably selfless decision. He joins Charlie in the summer vacation destination he dreads: Tennessee.
Shrinking is airing in a very different world from the one in which Urie last starred in a comedy hit. The Texas-born actor broke through after joining the cast of Ugly Betty in 2006, shortly after graduating from Juilliard, and he still vividly remembers the days of worrying about overnight ratings or being preempted by football games. But there are more similarities between Shrinking and Ugly Betty than you might imagine, too.
“This show — this cast and this material — does remind me of Ugly Betty,” Urie says of Shrinking. “It’s a totally different style and tone, but it’s a group of people who aren’t alike. When you put any of the two characters together, it was this new kind of magical chemistry — and that’s true for both shows. I feel from people that come up to me the same way that I did back then — I mean, people still come up to talk about Ugly Betty all the time. Now the people who grew up with it are showing it to their kids, and thank God it holds up.”
Hear more from Urie about his journey from Juilliard to television and the wild world of streaming, and what was really going through his mind during one of the all-time best television moments of last year: Jeff Hiller’s Emmy win for Somebody Somewhere.
Urie was nominated in the same category, and had technically just lost an Emmy at that moment, but you’d never know it from the look on his face. “A win for Jeff was a win for all of us,” Urie tells me. “It’s probably better than if I had won.”
On today’s podcast, you can also hear a conversation between me and Peter Knegt, host of the CBC’s interview series Here & Queer, digging into some new releases that are perfectly timed for Pride Month. As Peter points out, you don’t often get queer movies in theaters in June — the Pride parades keep everyone busy! But with the RuPaul-led disaster movie parody Stop! That! Train! in theaters now and the queer horror thriller Leviticus on its way, maybe that’s about to change.
