Joe Skinner: This is not a podcast episode about Michael Keaton. But it should be noted that Michael Keaton’s back to back run in 1988 and 1989 might be one of the most culturally resonant runs of Hollywood performances from the past 40 years. And for actor Michael Urie, his brain was in just the right kind of impressionable state in 1988. He was eight years old, and this moment in pop culture really stuck.
Michael Urie: It was specifically Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice and then Michael Keaton as Batman that made me understand what acting was. I realized, oh, that’s the same guy playing two totally different kinds of characters. And I kind of figured out, oh, that’s acting. He’s an incredible actor, and he can play, this hilarious, vaudevillian ghoul…
Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice: Go ahead, make my millennium!
Michael Urie: And then he can play this brooding, stoic, superhero.
Michael Keaton in Batman: I want you to do me a favor. I want you to tell all your friends about me. I’m Batman.
Michael Urie: So from then, I knew I wanted to do this.
Joe Skinner: Hi, I’m Joe Skinner, and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode our guest breaks down their creative process and the spark that inspired them. This week, we’re with actor Michael Urie. Urie first broke out with his series regular role as Marc St. James in the 2006 ABC dramedy, Ugly Betty. Since then, he’s bounced back and forth between film, television and theater, most recently as Jerome Robbins in the 2023 film Maestro, and as Brian in Apple TV’s ongoing series, Shrinking. And as we speak, Michael Urie is putting in eight shows a week as Prince Dauntless in the Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress. We’ll talk with Urie to see how he meets the demands of the Broadway stage and how he got here.
Joe Skinner: Going back to the late ’80s, it wasn’t just Michael Keaton that got Urie interested in acting, but also Tim Burton that got him interested in filmmaking.
Michael Urie: The thing that kind of, you know, talking about a spark, that sort of sparked me was, Tim Burton movies and specifically Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and then Beetlejuice, and then Batman. Tim Burton’s vision sort of explained filmmaking to me. I sort of understood by watching those three very different movies by the same guy. I see a point of view.
Joe Skinner: About 20 miles north of downtown Dallas is Plano, Texas, where Michael Urie called home when he was a kid watching Batman and Beetlejuice. Back then Plano was still a burgeoning town, just starting to become a booming part of the Dallas-Fort Worth area as companies like JCPenney and Frito Lay moved their headquarters there. As the crow flies, Urie was still over 1300 miles away from the Broadway stage. So, like many of us growing up in the suburbs, he had to scale down his ambitions to something a bit more realistic.
Michael Urie: So I wanted to make movies because of Tim Burton. I finally was like, okay, I should do theater. That’s the closest thing that I have access to and I became enamored with my teachers, and I thought, oh, I’ll be a drama teacher. Well, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll be a drama teacher and I’ll teach high school drama. I looked up to them so much and they were the only professionals I knew in show business.
Joe Skinner: But right as he was prepared to settle into an honorable career teaching drama in the Plano school district, Michael Urie heard a siren’s call that he just couldn’t ignore.
Michael Urie: I was a senior in high school and I did a lot of speech and debate competitions, which, it’s like cross examination debate or extemporaneous speaking, which is one side of things that I wasn’t doing, but then there’s also oral interpretation, which is dramatic interpretation or humorous interpretation where you take a published work and perform it. My uncle, Roberto Bonazzi, he’s gone now, but he was a published poet. And so I actually did something of his. It felt like a monologue. It felt like a person speaking or rambling or thinking. And it lent itself, I should say, to more than one interpretation. I think it was about his divorce, one of his divorces, and I thought it was a very serious poem and the audience started to laugh and in real time, I changed everything about my performance to cater to what that audience was enjoying about it, which was that it was funny or that they were finding me funny in that moment. And I made it all funny or what I thought they were finding funny. And it ended up being a riot and I won the competition and that was kind of the moment where I thought, okay, if that’s what acting is, if I can do that, I’m going to keep trying to do that. That was when I sort of pivoted away from being an aspiring high school drama teacher to being an aspiring actor.
Joe Skinner (Interview): It makes sense to me that one of these formative moments for you was when you were able to just get so excited about getting a reaction from a crowd from your poetry reading. I feel like what really sets theater apart from television or film is that you’re constantly responding to a crowd, right?
Michael Urie: Yeah, absolutely. They are the missing piece. Whether it’s a drama or a comedy, the audience is absolutely a part of the show. I got to learn that very early – getting laughs. But it’s not just laughs. It’s rustling of programs. It’s the coughing, it’s obviously cell phones, all that stuff is part of it. You know, when you come and sit into an audience, you’re, you’re really part of it. It’s not, it’s not like watching TV or watching a movie. You really are a part of it and we are very much aware of you. Maybe not every one of you, depending on how big the theater is. We might not be aware of all of you, but we, the actors, are very much aware of the audience.
Joe Skinner: In general, we tend to hold close to our heart a handful of memories that we can point to as evidence for what we made of our lives. For Michael Urie, in one hand he grips a collection of early memories of his own performances and pleasing his audiences. But in the other hand, he grips a collection of early memories where he is the audience.
Michael Urie: My parents have always been really terrific audience members. They love the art of being a spectator and in Dallas there’s a summer musical program where these Broadway tours come through. It’s called the Dallas Summer Musicals and they performed at Fair Park Music Hall, which is this massive theater in downtown Dallas. And we would go there to see Peter Pan, we went to see West Side Story, Porgy and Bess played there and I remember that was sort of when I discovered musical theater and I didn’t have a knack for singing or dancing, and I was seeing these Broadway tours where people were singing their faces off, but there were a few shows that I saw where, I thought, oh, I could play that. One of them, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, toured through Dallas with Ralph Macchio playing the lead. And Roger Bart, the great Roger Bart, who’s a big Broadway star, he’s in Back to the Future now playing Doc Brown. He played the villain of How to Succeed, Bud Frump, and I remember seeing it, and he was so funny. And I remember then listening to the cast recording and thinking, oh, I think I could play that. I think I could sing this character’s music. And I think I would be funny in this part. And so I sort of put it in a little filing cabinet in my brain as a role I could play.
Clip from How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Michael Urie: And that happened from time to time with shows like over the years, or cast recordings I would listen to, I would sort of file them away. Tommy Tune came through Dallas in a musical called Busker Alley.
Clip from Busker Alley.
Michael Urie: And Jerry Lewis did Damn Yankees. He played the devil in Damn Yankees, and it came through Dallas.
Clip from Damn Yankees.
Michael Urie: I got to see a bunch of, like, stars. And we always sat up in the balcony. Nosebleed seats. And what I remember specifically about those stars, was that I could see their faces. When you’re that far back, you’re not really seeing faces. When you’re way, way up at the balcony, you’re not really seeing faces. And maybe I couldn’t really see their face, but whatever they were putting out there, whatever energy they were bringing onto the stage, I felt like I could see their face. And it seemed like they were playing right to me, even though I was way up on the balcony. So that was, that was like, one of those things where, like, the stage became exciting to me. Not just like getting laughs, which I was starting to become addicted to, but, that you could be on a stage and somebody way up in the balcony, a kid way up in the balcony might feel like you were doing it just for them.
Joe Skinner: The die was cast. In fact, almost 20 years after he saw How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Urie would go on to make his Broadway debut in that same show in the role of Bud Frump at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. But how would he make that leap – watching from the nosebleeeds to playing to them? After the break, we’ll see how Michael Urie finally made the move to New York, the clowning techniques that he learned at Juilliard, and how all of this continues to shape the work he’s doing today alongside Sutton Foster in Once Upon a Mattress.
Joe Skinner: Actor Michael Urie had just graduated high school, with big ambitions but not a lot of precedent. You just don’t see a common pipeline of actors going from Plano, Texas to Broadway. But there was a local community college with a cool theater program, and they offered him a scholarship.
Michael Urie: That theater program did a New York field studies trip, which I did. I’d never been to New York. We saw thirteen shows in ten days, most of them on Broadway. We stayed right in the heart of Times Square, actually about a block away from where I am right now. We were seeing all of the… Saw the original cast of Ragtime and saw Alan Alda, Alfred Molina, and Victor Garber in Art, saw Anthony de la Paglia in A View from the Bridge and saw like Blue Man Group and The Fantastics, which had been running for like 40 years at that time and Forbidden Broadway, which is this spoof of Broadway shows. So we saw all of these incredible things, and we went on a tour of NYU and a tour of Juilliard. And when we toured Juilliard, it was very exciting, a very cool place and the teacher of this community college pulled me aside and said, you gotta audition for this place. And he said it just to me, he didn’t say it to anybody else. Or at least I didn’t see him say it to anybody else. And, and I was like, wow, I guess this guy knows something, and so maybe I’ll try. And I still didn’t think, I thought, there’s no chance I’ll get in. I mean, this is crazy. They take 20 people a year and thousands audition. It seems so unlikely, but because of that encouragement, and because I’d seen the school, and I had fallen in love with New York, I really wanted to come to New York, I auditioned kind of on a whim and, I didn’t audition anywhere else. I was going to stick it out at the community college another year. And I remember my parents being like, what, what’s going to happen if you get in? How are we going to pay for this? And I said, guys, I’m not, don’t worry about this. I’m not going to get in. It’s like, it’s such a tight, you know, cutthroat school. And I remember my mom saying, I think you might. And that was the first time that I was like, huh, mom? Mom really believes in me and maybe mom’s right. That was the first time I ever considered it a possibility. It was when my mom thought I might get in and then she was right and I got in.
Joe Skinner: So Michael and his family cobbled together the money with some financial aid, he was off to New York, and the rest, as they say, is history. Michael quickly found a knack for landing likable, physically dynamic and funny characters, most notably as Marc St. James in the TV show Ugly Betty.
Clip from Ugly Betty.
Michael Urie: He has a performance style that’s found him a lot of success in theater, too. He went on to make his Broadway debut in 2012, then won an Obie Award in 2017, and today you can see him eight days a week in the musical comedy, Once Upon A Mattress, alongside his co-star Sutton Foster. I wanted to know how Juilliard prepared him for this demanding line of work.
Michael Urie: The thing that I draw on for doing a musical comedy, where you’re dancing, and you’re singing, and you’re tumbling, I mean, I do tumbling in this, and all kinds of stuff, is, really like core strength. The first year at Juilliard, the movement classes is really an aerobics class. It’s every day, 9am you are moving your body, learning some simple jazz dance combos, but really it is physical, it is exhausting, and then your blood is flowing, your muscles are throbbing, and then you start class. Then you start acting, or you start voice class, or speech class, or whatever. And that, that was, that was, you get to Juilliard, you get shot out of a cannon, you are moving your body, sweating, rolling on the ground. So to this day, I mean, I don’t go to aerobics classes, but, I have to be physical every day before I do the show somehow, whether it’s, you know, like a self, a self yoga class or it’s going to the gym, or, you know, and at Once Upon a Mattress on two show days, Sutton Foster leads a warm up for anyone who wants to join, and it’s kind of an aerobics class, it’s kind of a dance class, and it brings me right back to, uh, first year at Juilliard, and it’s great, it’s a really, it’s a really great way to wake up your body and your brain to like have to remember a combination and to have to like exhaust yourself physically is a great way to kickstart the day.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Yeah, I never really thought about how much Juilliard is similar to an athletics program.
Michael Urie: Yeah, theater is athletic, and especially a musical. A musical is very athletic. I remember my sister coming to see, my sister was seven years older than me, and very athletic. She could play any sport and she was terrific at it. And I played none. I couldn’t play any sport. I hated competition. Um, and I hated that kind of, uh, I just hated that energy. And I remember she came to see me in a show at Juilliard, this big restoration comedy where I had sword fights and tumbling and all kinds of physical stuff. And she said, you’re an athlete.
Joe Skinner: Once Upon a Mattress is a 2 hour, 15 minute athletic performance. The show first opened way back in 1959 off Broadway, and was an adaptation of the 1835 Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Princess and the Pea.” Set in a medieval kingdom, it follows Princess Winnifred as she vies to marry Prince Dauntless. However, Dauntless’s overbearing mother, has decreed that only a “true” princess can marry her son, subjecting each potential bride to impossible tests to prove their worth. In a final test, Princess Winnifred must sleep on a stack of mattresses with a pea hidden at the bottom, and only if she feels the pea will she be deemed a “real” princess. The show is playing with a lot of tropes of princess fairy tales. Where you might expect a more stereotypical princess story to have a passive and kind princess like Cinderella or Snow White, Once Upon A Mattress subverts that with the loud and irreverent Princess Winnifred, who goes by Fred. Sutton Foster is getting rave reviews for her take on it, but the role was first made famous by Carol Burnett:
Clip of Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress (1959).
Joe Skinner: And as you may have guessed, Michael Urie’s character, Prince Dauntless, is the opposite of the brave prince you may expect — instead he is sheltered and naive.
Clip of Michael Urie in Once Upon a Mattress (2024).
Joe Skinner (Interview): So what first drew you to Prince Dauntless as a character, how would you describe that character and what makes that character’s psychology such a rich sort of space to mine for comedy?
Michael Urie: I love it when a character’s name informs who he is, you know, like being named Dauntless is really funny. Like, like that, that’s his, and his full name is Dauntless the Drab. That’s really funny. And that’s like, that’s already the writers are giving you something. The romance between Fred and Dauntless is so pure. They’re so, um, I mean, Dauntless has arrested development. His mother treats him like a child. And you sort of watch him become a man throughout the course of the play; Discover what it’s like to fall in love with a woman, what it’s like to be attracted to her and discovering her body and his own body and all these things. Like you will kind of watch it all happen in a very, in a very sweet, innocent way. But I also, because I didn’t know this show, and because, like I was saying before, I had been keeping this sort of mental filing cabinet of the kinds of roles I could play in musicals, that this one wasn’t on my radar, wasn’t in my filing cabinet, was very exciting to me, that somebody else saw me in this role. So that there was something out there that I didn’t seek out, that I hadn’t been waiting for and excited about. It really took the onus off of me to live up to some expectation I had in my head. I got to really be a blank slate and just sort of experience what it felt like to say the words and sing the songs and look into Sutton’s eyes and fall in love. That stuff all was like quite, quite pure and organic.
Joe Skinner (Interview): We don’t have to go through the whole curriculum or anything at Juilliard, but I am curious if there’s any particular teachings that you think of that relate specifically to the work that you’re doing now in Once Upon a Mattress that you can still point to as having influenced the way that you think of the musical comedy and the way you approach that style of acting and physical comedy. There’s such a physical comedic element to the work you’re doing.
Michael Urie: Yeah, so we had two different comedy classes at Juilliard over the four years. One was basically Shakespeare comedy with this great actor called Floyd King, who is still around, he’s a Shakespeare clown. And he’s done all the great Shakespeare clown parts. We would do a monologue for him from Shakespeare or a scene from Shakespeare or something else and he would find every ounce of funny in it. Using the truth of Shakespeare, you know, the truth and the psychology of Shakespeare to find the comedy. And then we had another comedy teacher who taught physical comedy, but it was really clowning. It was clowning, not in the circus sense of clowning, but in the time honored tradition of commedia dell’arte clowning.
Joe Skinner: Per the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Commedia dell’arte is a theatrical form characterized by improvised dialogue and a cast of colorful stock characters that emerged in northern Italy in the fifteenth century.” That might seem a little esoteric, but the influence of this era is felt in pop culture in everything from Disney cartoons to Adam Sandler movies.
Michael Urie: And that was taught by a guy named Christopher Bayes. That was probably the hardest class I ever took because he would put us all in a line on one side of the room and then he would say, okay, three of you go up in the corner and one at a time, you’ll walk to the middle of the room and then you’ll walk down stage to us and you’ll say, hi, you’ll say your name and then you’ll walk back up and back to the corner and, oh, be funny. (Laughs) All we had was our name and a walk and we would have to do something and be funny. And that is a terrifying thing to do. And you know, there a lot of, there were a lot of tears at Julliard. A lot of times people would start crying about things for whatever reason. None more so than in the physical comedy class. It’s, uh, it was, it was very hard and very scary because you can’t fake a laugh. Not really. I mean and we were told not to, you know, there’s like no helping. Don’t laugh unless it’s funny. And that was an amazing exercise in the truth of comedy and then getting an audience to actually laugh. If they don’t laugh, you fail. And those two classes, I think certainly in the musical comedy work, I go back to a lot.
Joe Skinner (Interview): So then when you’re building up your characterization and your approach to Prince Dauntless, you mentioned that at Juilliard, learning to mine something for comedy. How did you mine that character?
Michael Urie: It starts with the truth of whatever’s going on with that character, what’s that character’s problem, what’s that character’s want, and then usually it comes naturally, and I would say with Once Upon a Mattress especially, the physical life and the physical comedy is mostly organic. Like there’s a moment where Princess Fred has arrived at the kingdom and she’s swam the moat and she’s covered in sludge and mud and stuff. And I show her to her room and she gets cleaned up. And then when she comes back into the main room where I’m waiting for her, I’ve got my back to her giving her privacy, trying to be a gentleman. And she’s like, you can turn around. And she’s sort of like, pokes me and I get tickled, like I’m very ticklish. And then she starts really tickling me and I say, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And I sort of push her away. And in pushing her away, my hand ends up on her boob and we both freeze and it’s hilarious. And the audience goes nuts and just as that happens, somebody walks in and catches us, but we, we were just frozen and we can’t move. And so that has sort of become that not only are we frozen, but my hand is frozen to her. So even when I try to like get away, my hand knows something I don’t know, like my hand wants to be there, even though I’m trying to escape. And so it has become this like… This long, funny bit of like, how do I get my hand off of her boob? And it just comes from like a simple idea like that. Like what happens if, what happens if his hand is stuck there and he can’t get it off? What would I do? How would I try to get it off? Would, if I use my other hand to help? And then what if that hand gets stuck on the other boob? And it kind of builds from there. Another one is, uh, like, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. There was a moment in the play where I had to get from one level of the stage to another level, and there were no steps. And the director said, well, if you wanted to get up there, you’d have to climb the steps, which are way over there. And I said, well, could I climb these levels? And am I weak and would it be really hard for me to climb or have I ever tried to climb and I’m a prince who’s been, you know, pampered and sheltered his whole life. Maybe I don’t even know how or maybe I’m afraid of them. And, and so that became a very funny moment where I climb myself up and I’ve never quite done it before. So it’s often from something organic. It’s funny. Like you, if you come up with a physical bit that doesn’t come from a place of truth, it’s not going to work. It’s probably not going to play or the audience isn’t going to really get it. It’s funny. I mean, an audience really knows… They don’t know they know, but they know when something’s not real or not truthful. And that’s not to say that we aren’t big, or, over the top or still doing what is clearly a fairy tale. It’s just to say that, like, we start with the truth and when we go big, it’s just because the stakes are that high and that’s where we have to go.
Joe Skinner (Interview): I love that. You know, I feel like there’s this misconception that musical comedy or theater in general is sort of not real and I love that this kind of is suggesting otherwise.
Michael Urie: Yeah, when you get out of drama school, when I was first on TV, I got a lot of notes, be smaller, do less, not so big. And that was always really frustrating to me because I was always like, do less of what? I’m doing a lot of things over here. I’m spinning a lot of plates. I’m being a whole person. What do you mean do less? And I realized that was what they said because they didn’t, they didn’t, you know, have the tools to explain exactly what they meant for whatever reason because I was coming from a you know, like four years of nonstop acting training and they’re you know, like just trying to make their day on a TV show and what I’m doing isn’t reading right. But what I think it actually is is that when you’re on a stage, even when you’re being real, as real as you would be on a camera, you have to be real so that everyone can see it and that everyone can experience it in essentially the same way, whether they’re in the back of the balcony or in the very front row looking up your nose. Like you calibrate your performance based on the space you’re in. And you can’t necessarily see an actor thinking on stage. And so you have to sort of turn that into behavior, in order for your inner life to become outer life. But when a camera is a few inches from your face, they’re going to see you thinking, they might not know quite what you’re thinking, but it’s going to see that you’re thinking and that you’re going through something. And so often, if you need to convey an emotion on screen, you can just think it and it’ll show up on your face.
Joe Skinner (Interview): I love that. I feel like, what you’re describing, responding to audiences in these various ways just makes me think of how performance and art and entertainment in general is really just about fostering an empathetic environment, a way to have communication with another person. And, you know, I’m just curious what you see to be like the grander value of the work you do and of art and entertainment. I know it’s kind of a big picture question. (Laughs)
Michael Urie: That is a big one!
Joe Skinner (Interview): We’re getting to the end of the interview. So that’s where the big question comes.
Michael Urie: And by the end we have to figure out life?
Joe Skinner (Interview): Yeah, that’s the next one. We’ll see if we have time.
Michael Urie: Um, I love what you say about empathy. Um, that’s something we talked about, you know, when we play villains in drama school, we play a villain, you know, they tell us you can’t judge your characters and it’s true, like, even when you’re playing Iago in Othello, who is, you know, as evil as they come, you have to figure out why Iago has justified his behavior and how he has gotten to this place and you don’t have to sympathize with him, but you can’t judge him them. And it’s a hard thing, you know, when you’re, when you’re somebody who plays likable characters, you get addicted to that, to being liked. But, I think certainly in the theater, it’s true in film and television too, but in the theater, we go to watch acting. We watch acting to see ourselves reflected back at us. And in the theater, it’s happening in real time, in real space for the first time and the last time. So even though we do Once Upon a Mattress eight times a week, it is different every time because we’re different, because the audience is different, because the day is different. I mean, we were talking about, you know, the ways in which our audience changed when the kids went back to school. And, the ways in which our audience will change the week before the election, or the ways that it’s different when it’s raining outside or the ways that it’s different when there’s been a school shooting that day. You know, like you really feel that in the audience. You really feel that the events of the world, the events of the day, and you feel it in yourself. So, I love the idea that it is an act of empathy. We’re going into contract with each other when the show starts. This is a civilized place where on one side of the room a story is being told and on the other side a story is being listened to and we’re asking each other to literally empathize with each other and also see humanity unfold.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Well, thanks for staying late. I really appreciate it.
Michael Urie: My pleasure.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Are you doing another show today?
Michael Urie: Yeah, we have a show tonight. And I’ll probably go home and take a nap, go to the gym, eat something, and then go be in a Broadway musical.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Sounds great. Well, good luck with it. And thanks again for your time. Appreciate it.
Michael Urie: Really nice talking to you. Thank you.
Joe Skinner: And that’s our show. Thank you so much to Michael Urie for taking the time to talk. You can see him in a lot of things right now. Once Upon a Mattress is on Broadway through November 30th. Season two of Shrinking just started and runs through December on Apple TV+. And believe it or not, Michael is in a new film alongside his childhood hero, Michael Keaton. It’s called Goodrich, and you can catch it now in limited release. And don’t forget, if you like what you heard, please rate and review our show, it really helps, and tell your friends to listen to American Masters: Creative Spark, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen on our site at pbs.org/americanmasters.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Jon Berman. And thanks to Diana Chan and Cristiana Lombardo for their work on this episode.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Charina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation.
