Pop-Culturalist.com

Michael Urie is a masterful storyteller whose illustrious career spans film, television, and theater. With a remarkable talent for captivating audiences, he has delivered unforgettable performances and crafted compelling narratives both in front of and behind the camera.

This year, Michael Urie returns to the role of Cyril Chippington-Smythe, the world’s wealthiest bachelor living a life of luxury with the aid of his ingenious steam-powered valet, Bentley (played by Dakin Matthews), in Tom Alan Robbins’ critically acclaimed audio drama series, Twits.

Now in its second season, Twits in Peril finds Cyril happily swilling down a Brandy and Prozac at the Club Bar when his old friends, Ford and Lincoln, join him. The conversation turns to the gulf between the privileged class and the masses, leading to a bet that Cyril can pass as a member of the working class for a week. His cousin Binky places a wager on Cyril’s success. However, they haven’t accounted for the absence of his mechanical valet. Bentley, determined to prepare Cyril, enlists their grocery delivery person, Ernie, to tutor and chaperone him. Despite their efforts, it’s clear that this will be an uphill climb.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Michael about Twits in Peril, recording the audio drama, collaborating with the star-studded ensemble and creative team, and more.

PC: Your character lives a really sheltered and privileged existence. Because of a bet he makes, he gets to see how the other side lives and the unintentional impact he has on others. There’s such a beautiful arc of personal growth that he undergoes throughout the series, particularly in Season 2. As an actor, how did you find your way into this character? What was it about him that resonated with you?
Michael: Tom Alan Robbins first came to me with this idea during the thick of the pandemic. He said, “I’ve been writing this steampunk series that’s like Jeeves and Wooster. It’s very British and very silly. But I’ve written a lot, and I’d love for you to hear it in my writers’ group.” So a bunch of us got on Zoom and read it in his writers’ group. He put together this incredible cast, which included Mary Testa, Christian Borle, Stephen DeRosa, and all these amazing people to do it. It was hysterical. I dove in headfirst because I love Tom. I loved the premise. The cast was so excited to get on Zoom every couple of weeks and read another episode.

First, I loved being the narrator. I loved having a lot of lines and relishing Tom’s language, which is so funny and dense. It’s the type of material where if you read it more than once, you see there’s a lot more there. If you listen to it more than once, there are a lot of gems within each big chunk of text. I liked playing a boob. I like that Cyril Chippington-Smythe is a lovable boob. He’s privileged and arrogant, but he’s open to learning and changing. He has this fabulous mechanical butler who keeps him out of trouble and sets him in the right direction, morally and ethically.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Arthur with Dudley Moore. It’s about a rich drunk who falls in love with a poor woman. I love watching the classes clash, especially when it’s in a funny way. We sort of do it in real life all the time. But watching it play out in such a fantastical way, as we do in Twits, I love it. I fell in love with it immediately and always looked forward to Tom’s writers’ group where we could get together and read another chapter.

PC: This series was born during a time when you all wanted to create but weren’t able to. What’s been the most surprising part about this experience thus far? How has this experience lent itself to the work that you’ve done on stage and screen since?
Michael: What’s really exciting about Twits is how much of the sound he wrote into the script. When you’re making an audio drama—or what we call scripted podcasts now—it’s a soundscape. It’s characters speaking, but it’s also footsteps, music, the sounds of chatter in restaurants or birds outside. It’s all the elements that fill out the world and soundscape.

Tom brought a sound effects guy into all those first reading sessions. So from the very beginning, the very first reading that we did on Zoom in the middle of the pandemic, there was a sound effects guy making the sound of a mechanical robot. The mechanical butler character that Dakin Matthews plays makes all these funny sounds like whistles coming out of his head, gears shifting, and the sound of metal clanking. We were hearing that from the very beginning. When you listen to the show now, which we recorded separately, we didn’t get to hear the sounds as we were recording, but we did in the past.

I was aware of the way that sound affected audio dramas, but also film and television. However, the experience of working on Twits has enhanced my awareness when I’m shooting something for TV or a movie or when I’m on stage. It helps with the sense memory of it all and getting you into that real place.

PC: I love hearing the story about the makeshift recording booth you made for Season 1. There’s also a lot of unexpected physicality in audio storytelling. Have you developed any new techniques for this project?
Michael: When we recorded the first season, I believe I was in Montreal shooting a film. I was living in this cool house and found a room that wasn’t being used for anything else. I dragged all the extra pillows and mattresses into that room and created a sound booth. I think it worked pretty well. My Wi-Fi wasn’t always reliable, so I would get kicked off a lot, but like so many during the pandemic, we got really creative and came up with lots of different ways to make art. For the Twits recordings, Broadway Podcast Network was gracious enough to hire us wherever we were. I happened to be in Montreal. We all got on together and tried to record it together. That only lasted a certain amount of time.

What I’ve taken away from the Twits podcast recordings and what Tom does so brilliantly with the text is that everything you need is there. As an actor, that’s like Shakespeare. Everything is in the text. You can find all the answers in the way the text is laid out, in the meter that Shakespeare would create, and Tom really does that too. I’ve done some audio stuff before and certainly auditioned for a lot of radio commercials. I’ve done a bunch of audiobooks, but what I learned from acting in a radio drama was the importance of crispness—the crispness of speech—especially when playing such a posh character. But it’s important in anything that you do because when you’re listening to things orally, we hear all of that. All of that comes through the ears. We don’t have the luxury of reading subtitles, reading someone’s lips, or seeing someone’s emotions. With Twits and Tom’s writing, it demanded that you use your whole self, your whole body, and every articulator imaginable. That was really useful for me to use in subsequent audio projects because that’s your only tool. You don’t have the luxury of body or face to tell a story. It all has to come through your voice. You can tell the audience what your face is doing with your voice if you’re clever.

PC: There’s such a commitment and earnest quality that you bring into this role due to your character’s naivete and his perception of the world, which makes for all these hilarious one-liners. But it’s so grounded as he makes these self-discoveries. How much of what we hear is scripted versus improvised?
Michael: I would say that 95% is scripted. They would encourage us in the more transitional moments to improvise. For example, what we might be mumbling as we went down a hall or as we came up a staircase. There are a lot of places where groups are exasperated at the same time—everyone’s screaming or shouting. They would give us the liberty to say whatever we wanted. But this is one of the scripts where I had no intention of improvising because I thought it was so funny and tight as it was.

PC: There is such a star-studded ensemble as part of this audio series. You’ve worked with so many of them. I know that it’s changed in Season 2, but you’ve said in the past that Christian is someone who would throw unexpected things at you throughout the process. That’s such an interesting parallel to performing on stage where anything can happen on a given day. How has your stage background lent itself to this experience? How has this special group of collaborators pushed each other creatively over the two seasons?
Michael: Many of us are stage actors, and most of us did this together on Zoom in those writers’ groups during the pandemic, which felt like our rehearsal period. We would read these together for Tom’s writing group on Zoom, and we could see each other. The thing about Christian specifically is that you see his name next to a character and you think you have an idea of what he’s going to do with it. I’ve seen him in a million things, so I think I know what he’s going to do. But he dashes every single expectation because every time I think I know what he’s going to do, it’s something different and much funnier than what I thought. It’s always a surprise. While I wasn’t wrong in how he might do it, it was never how I thought he would do it. He’s such a stage animal. You don’t know what you’re going to get from him with any given choice he might make, whether that’s in a podcast or a Broadway musical.

We had spent so much time together that once we were separate, we were able to fill in those gaps ourselves. Even though I wasn’t getting his voice back at me, I still knew what to expect, which sometimes is to expect the unexpected. But I will also say about Tom Alan Robbins, he was there for everyone’s recordings. He could do an impression of any of us. He became our off-camera reader every time that we would record on our own. He was able to give us, if it had already been recorded, what each actor did. If it hadn’t been recorded yet, he could imagine what they would do. Tom was able to be our swing and step in at any moment and play a character. We were able to keep things alive, fresh, and spontaneous in that way.

PC: Have there been any early conversations about a possible Season 3? What’s next for you?
Michael: I’m about to do Once Upon a Mattress on Broadway with Sutton Foster, which is really fun. I can’t wait to get back into the rehearsal room. We did it at City Center for Encores. That’s a busy schedule. Broadway shows are demanding. But I could find time to do more Twits if they wanted to do another season. I’m there. It’s so fun to do. It’s a great exercise for an actor to sit with a script and do the entire thing with just your voice. It’s really fun and rewarding to find our way into a character and not be able to rely on our facial expressions that we can add on the stage or screen. It’s great practice and it’s fun for audiences to listen to.

To keep up with Michael, follow him on X and Instagram. Listen to Twits in Peril on the Broadway Podcast Network.