Michael Urie is having a season of reckoning. For two decades, audiences have delighted in his buoyant charisma on television from ABC’s Ugly Betty to his Emmy-nominated role in Apple TV+’s Shrinking. His Broadway resume is likewise impressive, from starring in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song to, more recently, Cole Escola’s hit comedy Oh, Mary! But when he speaks about his latest project, starring Off-Broadway in Red Bull Theater’s production of Richard II at the Astor Place Theater through November 30, what comes through is not triumph but gratitude.

“It’s so dreamy because I’ve been chasing this role for 20 years,” he says, his voice quickening with the boyish awe that has clearly never left him. “And we’ve been trying to get Red Bull to do it for many years. And that mixture of me, Red Bull, and [director] Craig [Baldwin], this season, this fall, and the Astor Place Theater being available—like all of that coming together, it’s very gratifying. I feel like showbiz is so much about being in the right place at the right time and then being ready for the moment.”

Urie knows about moments. His own actually began at Red Bull Theater, in a downtown basement, in a sprawling cast performing Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger's Tragedy. “I replaced somebody. Somebody had to leave the show, and I replaced them. I had four days of rehearsal playing this awesome character, and I joined this huge cast,” he laughs, leaning his head back, remembering one of his first professional jobs out of Juilliard. “You know, Red Bull has always specialized in doing big casts, big plays, and we played in this basement. Big hit. The New York Times came. And the casting director of Ugly Betty came to see it. So, it was doing a Red Bull show that kind of got me in the door to get cast in Ugly Betty.” 

That television role, of course, made him a household name: Marc St. James, the scheming, sparkling assistant with the best one-liners. Urie is aware that he might have lived there forever, the television funnyman. But his career has always bent toward the stage, toward Shakespeare, toward something grander, harder, stranger. 

“When I was in high school, we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he recalls. “And I was always afraid, you know, we would go to see Shakespeare in the Park in Dallas (where I’m from). And it was always fun, but I never really understood it. We did it my senior year of high school, we did Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I fell in love with it. I played Demetrius, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is really thrilling.’ And this guy was actually writing about us, even though it was 400 years ago, it’s about us, it’s our same psychology.”

At Juilliard, the obsession deepened. “My second year, the fourth-year class did Richard II, and that was my first experience, seeing it, hearing it, and Lee Pace played Richard. And he was very, very good. And I had my eye on it. I’ve had my eye on it since then, because he’s known as the vain king. People think of him as queer-coded. And he avoids violence, and he sort of gets fixated on his clothes. And so, you know, there are some aspects of it that I felt I could relate to.”

When he speaks of Richard II, the connection feels almost tender. “I think that the play is about a king who is mis-using his power and is called out on it and loses his crown because of it. And he’s checked,” Urie explains. “He became king when he was, like, 12. And he thinks he was chosen by God, and he thinks that that will keep him in his seat forever. And he’s wrong. And someone sees an opening, and they take it, and he gets deposed, and it’s not a violent deposition. It’s actually quite peaceful, and it’s fascinating how it plays out. That’s what’s interesting. It’s not a violent play, but it is still filled with conflict.”

Urie is most alive when describing the mechanics of performance, how a joke lands or how a Shakespearean verse line resonates. “The same things that elicit a laugh in a comedy like Oh, Mary! are the things that we can [use to] elicit laughter in Shakespeare, even when it’s not funny. I’ve been in Shakespeare plays—Hamlet. There’s some funny stuff in Hamlet, but the audience laughs when they recognize something, when they understand something. I mean, we see it in dramas all the time. Arthur Miller plays get laughs. The laugh isn’t necessarily because, ‘Oh, haha, that’s funny.’ Or, ‘Oh, haha, that’s a joke, set up, punch.’ We’re laughing at ourselves. We’re laughing at the mirror that has been put up to us.”

For him, Shakespeare is a kind of like mathematics. “It’s a lot of finding the equation, changing the equation, and adapting the equation. Shakespeare, especially this play, which is a completely regular play in terms of the meter, the scansion of the iambic pentameter, is very regular. Unlike a play like The Winter’s Tale or even Hamlet, which is very irregular, the whole thing is in verse. There’s no prose at all ... there’s a lot of rhyming verse. And that kind of gives you a score, like a musical score, to follow … I mean, there’s lines in Oh, Mary! that, if I get one word wrong, won’t get a laugh. That’s math, too.”

The timing feels uncanny, that now, after his Emmy nomination and his Broadway triumph, Urie is stepping into the role that has lingered in his imagination since his student days. “I feel like this is the moment for this part and me and this play, and I’m just feeling very … I have a lot of gratitude. I love the theatre so, so much.”

Urie teases that the Red Bull staging will tilt the story through a queer-coded lens. “I think it’s really interesting to set it in the 1980s, where we had a lot of queer people in power who were still closeted, but were doing sometimes very exciting things, sometimes very flamboyant things—like a Liberace, a Halston. Also, some people who were doing really terrible things, like a Roy Cohn … It was a very charged time to be a gay person, and especially in power, and in the closet. And I think that there’s something really important, fascinating about us setting this play there. There’s gonna be amazing music, amazing clothes. Our set is gorgeous.”

He grins when describing the Astor Place Theater, which up until February 2 had hosted the Blue Man Group since 2001. “To take the Astor Place back. No offense to the Blue Man crew, but it’s very cool to put a play in there again after all these years. The stage is very small, the audience is quite big, and it’s very intimate. The play is going to feel like it’s in close up, which will be, I think, thrilling for the audience to be in it with us, and have this glamor and fabulousness right in their laps.”

What is most striking in conversation with Urie is how alive he is to possibility, how he refuses to calcify into type. He has carried both screwball timing and Shakespearean cadence in the same breath. Now, at this point in his career, he is stepping into the role that has haunted him for decades, one he has dreamed of since the days when he watched Lee Pace shimmer as Richard on a Juilliard stage. Urie calls it dreamy, gratifying, mathematical, topical, queer, fabulous. For the rest of us, it is simply a joy to see him ascend, to become a sovereign of his own career.

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Photos: Richard II at Red Bull Theater

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