ALEX GONZALEZ | Contributing Writer
AlexGonzalez38@gmail.com
In the third season of Apple TV’s Shrinking, currently streaming, our beloved community of characters is faced with a variety of choices and new paths.
Alice (Lukita Maxwell) is set to graduate high school and is making decisions about college, while her father Dr. Jimmy Laird (Jason Segal) must cope with her being gone, especially as Jimmy’s patient-turned-friend Sean (Luke Tennie) is also planning to move out.
Their neighbors, Liz (Christa Miller) and Derek (Ted McGinley) struggle when they bring their 24-year-old son back home after he loses his job. Dr. Paul Rhodes (Harrison Ford) and his new wife Dr. Julie Baram (Wendie Malick) explore the idea of moving to Connecticut as Paul is grappling with Parkinson’s. And Gaby (Jessica Williams) must learn how to relinquish the need for control as she navigates her relationship with Derrick #2 (Damon Wayans Jr.).
But perhaps one of the more cozy storylines this season comes in the form of Brian (Michael Urie) and his husband Charlie (Devin Kawaoka) welcoming their baby, Sutton Foster, whom they are adopting from a quirky woman named Ava (Claudia Sulewski). Over the course of the show’s three seasons, viewers have seen Brian grow from being self-centered and always needing to be right into being a selfless family man.
“All the characters have gotten to a place where they’ve been forced to change something about themselves that they didn’t necessarily like,” Urie tells Dallas Voice in a recent interview via Zoom. “The most obvious one is Jimmy. His wife died, and, when we meet him, he’s hit rock bottom, putting his life back together, and now he’s starting to move forward.
“And for Brian, he’s discovered that he’s capable of putting others before himself. We all knew his mantra — ‘Everything goes my way’ — was going to get tested, and he’s had to come to the realization that everything doesn’t always go his way,” Urie continues.
“Sometimes he has to put other people first, whether it’s Charlie or his friends and family or his baby now. I think he’s going to be okay at it.”
In an upcoming episode of Shrinking, Brian reveals to his father that he has adopted a baby. In previous episodes, we saw that Brian has a complicated relationship with his father (Brian Howe), even joking that it didn’t even register with his father that he and Charlie even got married.
Though Urie says he didn’t draw from real-life experiences for this particular storyline, he felt he could connect with Brian well and bring this scenario to the screen.“Luckily the writing is so good, I could just find this guy where he is,” says Urie. “That’s not the kind of thing that I would ever keep from my father or be able to keep from my father. He would sniff it out way too easily.
“But that’s what’s so cool about playing a role,” he adds. “We contain multitudes, and this guy doesn’t have to represent all of us in order to mirror humanity. And the other thing about this show is, anytime I think I can guess what’s going to happen, I’m wrong. They always come up with something different and more interesting.”
At its heart, community is the foundation of Shrinking. The characters, all of different ages look out for each other, whether it’s Liz comforting Alice while she and Jimmy are both processing the death of Tia (Lilan Bowen), Jimmy’s wife and Alice’s mother; Brian, Jimmy and Alice learning to forgive Louis (Brett Goldstein), the drunk driver who killed Tia, and show him grace; or the whole crew coming together to care for baby Sutton Foster, as Brian and Charlie find themselves overwhelmed.
The cast and crew echo this sense of camaraderie even when the cameras are off.
“Right when we started our first season, Michael and I skipped small talk and became real friends,” says Miller. “I had seen his audition, and he was in a different league than anyone else, and I was so excited to work with him. This year, I had the good fortune to have a lot of scenes with Michael, and I was always excited for work those days.
“He and I work in a similar way and end up having too much fun.” Miller says. “We both are super prepared, which allows us to try things many ways, which lead to unexpected moments.”
These sorts of intergenerational friendships are often at the forefront of Urie’s work. Back in 2023, he directed Silver Foxes for Uptown Players, which tells the story of a group of queer male friends who join forces to break their older friends out of a homophobic assisted living facility. Urie, who hails from Plano, says he was drawn to the story — written by Stan Zimmerman and James Berg — because it captured real-life LGBTQ+ issues that often go unspoken.
“I have a lot of great friends who are older and younger,” says Urie. “Now that I’m in my 40s, I have young friends that I learned from, who I love. We do think differently, and we are growing up in different worlds, and I love that. I think that’s a very ‘found family’ thing.”
Urie also confirms that a sequel to Silver Foxes is in the works, with him, Zimmerman and Berg set to hop on Zoom in the coming days.
“[Michael is] a cherished friend who is not only whip smart but who has been intimately involved in all aspects of theatre, from classic plays to experimental off Broadway productions,” Zimmerman and Berg noted in an email to Dallas Voice. “And he was gracious enough to share his insights as we collectively brought the play to life for the world premiere at Uptown Players.”
For more than two decades, Urie has been playing iconic television characters, including Marc St. James, the sassy, snarky assistant to Vanessa Williams’ Wilhelmina Slater on Ugly Betty; Redmond, the ambitious and often cruel literary agent on Younger, and now Brian. At this point in his career, Urie feels that he can relate to and empathize with Marc even more, noting that some things in the industry never change.
“There’s no right way to do show business,” says Urie. “There’s lots of wrong ways, but I don’t think there’s any one right way, and you have to figure all that out on your own.
“It’s a completely different world. We’re constantly looking for jobs, and our entertainment is our is our career. I think Marc St. James was like that,” he says. “He had to learn it himself. He was just inspired to do something, and drawn to a career and a vocation, and he didn’t have any guidance or foundation for that. He just had to sort of go and be that.”
These days, Urie calls New York City home. During our call, he reels over found stained glasses and kitchen table and chair sets he found on the streets. He has also taken up a love of thrifting, and he and his partner have decorated their home with items from local thrift shops.
But he does still enjoy visiting Texas, where he has memories of riding bikes through the suburban air, soundtracked by the chirps of June bugs and garnished with the scent of wet grass. And Urie will return to Texas in May for the Dallas Theater Center’s Centerstage Gala, where he will the headlining entertainer for the evening.