Michael Urie is a consummate performer, equally comfortable plying his craft on stage, on camera, or in the bedroom of his New York apartment. The Upper West Side pad is where both he and his partner, actor Ryan Spahn, record most of their self-taped auditions, including the one that landed Urie his Emmy-nominated role as manic best friend Brian on the Apple TV+ comedy Shrinking. The video, shared exclusively with The Hollywood Reporter and shown below, reveals just how dialed in Urie was to the character — even as his scene partner, Spahn, read Jason Segel’s lines in a dry, affectless tone to avoid drawing too much attention to himself. (“The only thing in the world we fight about is self tapes,” Urie says. “And so basically anytime he has an audition, I have an audition, like it gets tense for that reason.”)
Between performances of Oh Mary! on Broadway, Urie spoke with THR to describe his self-tape process and why he prefers it to in-person auditions.
“I’m a fan of self tapes,” says Urie. “I know there’s a lot of people who like to go in and audition in person. I guess that they like the feedback. They like to get notes. But I like a self-tape because it is actually more like what working on TV or film is like. You can do takes. You can decide where you want the camera. You can watch it back.”
And unlike in-person try-outs, where actors often have scripts in hand, self-taping allows auditioners to better prepare and go off book, freeing them up to perform.
The scenes Urie recorded and sent to Shrinking’s producers — Ted Lasso’s Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein — were mostly from the second episode of the show’s first season. “It was really easy to memorize,” Urie says. “It was such a good script — and it was already picked up. It wasn’t just a pilot. It was a real-deal TV show with a big ol’ star, Jason Segel.” (Urie did not yet know that Harrison Ford would be joining the cast.) “This felt like a job I could get. And that’s so all those things make it easier.”
When Urie and Spahn shot the tape, they were both starring in Jane Anger, an off-Broadway comedy written for them by their friend Talene Monahon, about William Shakespeare’s getting writer’s block while on lockdown during the plague. (Parallels with COVID confinement were very much the point.) Urie grew a beard for the first time to play the Bard, which is why he sports one in the audition, and why, by extension, Brian has one on Shrinking.
Unlike Monahon’s fictional version of Shakespeare, Urie didn’t let the lockdown keep him down. Early in the pandemic, he livestreamed a solo performance from his apartment of Buyer and Cellar, the critically acclaimed one-man show he premiered in 2013, about an aspiring actor who takes a job as an employee in the entirely non-fictional mini theme park Barbra Streisand built in her basement. “I think I did over six hundred performances, and that was the only time I ever did it without anyone laughing,” recalls Urie.
The experience may have prepared him for his Shrinking audition a few years later, in which he delivered a finely tuned comedic performance to an all but empty room (and if Spahn was laughing, it wasn’t audible).
Urie claims he forgot about the audition tape shortly after hitting send. “Over the years, I’ve gotten really good at making the audition, sending it away, and then throwing away the materials. Literally. I literally waste the paper. I will throw it away so it’s not even in my home. I won’t keep it just in case I get called back. I get rid of it.”
Several weeks went by before he got a call from his reps. And it sounded like bad news. “They said, ‘Well, we really thought this might go to a screen test.’” Devastated, Urie asked them what happened. “And they were like, ‘You just got it. That’s all.’” No callback required. “Agents love that. They love doing that.”
With that, he learned that he’d gotten booked for 10 episodes of Shrinking. And there was one more thing: “They let me know that they also hired Harrison Ford,” Urie says with a laugh, “so don’t expect much money.”