Michael Urie Recalls Brittany Murphy’s “Sweet” Gesture After His ‘Uptown Girls’ Role Was Cut

More than 20 years after he was left on the cutting room floor, Michael Urie recently opened up about his experience filming Uptown Girls (2003).

The Emmy-nominated actor said that the movie’s star, the late Brittany Murphy, “was so sweet” to him during his “half of day” of filming as her NYC heiress character Molly Gunn’s pig walker.

“It was one of my very first jobs and it was a movie and I hadn’t really done anything and I played a pig walker,” he explained in an Entertainment Weekly video. “Really a dog walker, but in this scene I was picking up a pig. So, the scene was with five dogs and a pig.”

Urie added of Murphy, “She was so sweet and amazing as an actor. I remember her being so sweet and insisting that we’d met before, but we definitely had not. It was so sweet. I was really touched by I was like, ‘No, I promise we haven’t met before.’ And she’s like, ‘Are you sure? Because I feel like we have!’ and it was like so adorable and weird.”

Although his character was cut from the Boaz Yakin-helmed film, Urie recounted, “I went to the rap party, and I saw her and she was, again, so sweet to me and she said, ‘I mentioned you in another scene. I talked about you and I added it in.'”

In Uptown Girls, Molly (Murphy) lives a charmed life as the daughter of a deceased rockstar who left her everything, until her greedy wealth manager skips town with all her money. Landing a job as the nanny to neurotic Ray (Dakota Fanning), the free-spirited ‘It’ girl learns how to grow up with some help from the young girl.

Murphy died at age 32 on Dec. 20, 2009, from the combined effects of pneumonia, iron-deficiency anemia and multiple drug intoxication.