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Michael Urie and Becki Newton are having a “When Harry Met Sally” moment, and it’s not just because they’re telling the story of how they met.
Urie: The first day of the pilot.
Newton: Yup.
Urie: We met on 23rd Street.
Newton: On 23rd Street, between 5th and 6th, and Ashley Jensen was there.
Urie: With Ashley Jensen. The three of us met and we were hi, hi, hi.
Newton: We were like, what is this? I guess it’s a pilot.
Urie: We ran around, had lunch.
Newton: Filmed a little. Said goodbye.
They could go on like this forever. In fact, spend a little time with the “Ugly Betty” costars and a pattern emerges: Like the delicious trouble-making assistants they play on the show, Urie and Newton complete each other’s sentences, enhance each other’s jokes and are crazy about each other. (So much so that Urie has moved to the apartment building where Newton and her husband, actor Chris Diamantopoulos, live.)
They met last year in New York City, both of them struggling actors looking for their big break. Urie, 27, a Juilliard graduate, had spent his career in theater. Newton, 29, had guest-starred on a few TV shows, including “Charmed,” “American Dreams” and “Law & Order: SVU.”
Coincidentally, they had approached their “Ugly Betty” auditions with the same kind of self-protecting abandon that is a byproduct of the acting rejection mill. Newton pictured Amanda Tanen as a leggy, skinny model much taller than she is. She figured she’d never land this character part, especially after blowing two other pilot auditions that same day.
For audition No. 3, the scene was the moment Betty (America Ferrera) arrives at Mode magazine sporting a Guadalajara poncho and Amanda snipes: “Are you the before?”
“I was bored. I was angry. I was hungry,” said Newton as she curled up on a poolside couch at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, covering the tiny piece of fabric posing as her dress (Amanda’s wardrobe) with a hotel bathrobe. “All of the things that Amanda is all of the time. So I said it with lots of anger and bitterness behind it.”
Although Urie believed he could handily portray the “bitchy gay assistant” Marc St. James was supposed to be, the role was only for the pilot, so he had no hope for a steady gig. But then it occurred to him to grab one of the casting executives and pretend he was injecting Botox into her face, just as the script called for Marc to do to his boss, Wilhelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams).
“We were trying to find a girl that is gorgeous and funny, and that’s a lot tougher than you think,” creator Silvio Horta said. “It’s really rare. And Becki came in and she was beautiful and she just nailed it. We were howling in the room. With Michael, he was doing a play, playing a geologist, and he came in with this beard and looking completely unlike Marc. But he was just so funny and his timing was so perfect that, even though his part was initially conceived as a guest star, when we saw the dailies, we were like, ‘Oh, this guy is just fantastic.’ ”
Simply inseparable
Fans shudder to think of an “Ugly Betty” world without this catty couple and their over-the-top shenanigans. What other attention-starved characters on TV would go for disrobing on a red carpet to get the attention of the paparazzi, as Amanda, provoked by Marc, did this season? Moments like this have catapulted Marc and Amanda to much-watched coupledom, even though he’s gay and she, to put it nicely, has issues with monogamy.
TheTVAddict.com recently called Marc and Amanda the new Jack and Karen (“Will & Grace”) for the same reason the show’s writers have embraced creating more scenes for the improvisation-inspired actors. They scheme, they lodge zingers and, oh, do they love to gossip.
“They had one little moment together in the pilot, just a little snarkiness, and they came up with something where they were walking away holding arms, and we thought, this is a fun duo to play,” Horta said. “I think what’s fun about watching them is that Betty is the heart of the show, and she’s the character we identify with. But they’re the little devil on our shoulder. They say the things that everyone thinks.”
Remember when Marc and Amanda called each other “Nicole Bitchy and Nelly Ripa?” That was ad-libbed. Ask Urie and Newton to cite other examples of their wit and the actors excitedly relive many of their scenes together, line by line.
“It’s so easy to improv when the writing is already there,” said Urie, who is nothing like his flamboyant man-boy alter ego. “We spend the whole day at work going, ‘Would it be funny if . . . ?’ ”
A scene in which Marc pointed out who was getting fired was supposed to go like this:
Marc: These are the people who get to stay and these are the people who get the Jimmy Choos.
Amanda: The what?
Marc: The boot.
But the BFFs couldn’t stop there. Their riffing survived the final cut:
Amanda: What?
Marc: Later Skater.
Amanda: What?
Marc: Gone.
“What’s great about them is that they have this great chemistry together,” Horta said. “They will just come up with things on the spot. They love gen-pop things. They’re able to take things and run with it, whether it’s words or physical comedy.”
Others have seized on their spark. Urie, Newton and costar Mark Indelicato performed a parody of “One” from a “A Chorus Line” at the ABC “upfronts” in May. Urie and Newton performed “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” by Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand at a charity event in August. Now, the American Music Awards want them to appear “in character” backstage.
Which came first, Marc and Amanda’s friendship or Urie and Newton’s? The question prompts another “When Harry Met Sally” moment:
Urie: They can’t wait to gab and talk about everything, silly and stupid. I think that’s where everybody got the idea for Marc and Amanda to be friends -- because we were becoming such fast friends.
Newton: I think it’s the opposite. I think we became friends in real life because our characters became friends. We started having so much fun. I remember the “Fat Carol” episode, where Marc and Amanda get Betty on their side. That was the first time we worked together, and we had so much fun. And I think we realized we had so much in common -- that this was our first job and we loved it so much and were so grateful.
Urie: I remember the episode before that, we had one exchange together and we made it into like four exchanges. And I remember one of the producers going, “Oh, good, they’re a team. We need to write more for them.” (A pause). And they never used it.
Newton: Clearly it was genius! But it does make sense that our characters would become friends.
Michael: Oh, yeah, they’re like Frick and Frack.
Or Nicole and Nelly.
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maria.elena.fernandez@latimes.com
