“I honestly lost myself a little bit,” she said. “I’d been told by some people that I really loved and trusted that like, ‘Maybe it’s not gonna work out, because of your size.’ And I know as I look back, they were doing what they thought was helpful. But it was so hard.”

Milligan can put it all in a sunnier context now, at 39, thanks to time and therapy and success. Major Broadway success. As Aunt Debra, the endearingly larcenous life force of “Kimberly Akimbo,” Milligan is giving one of the season’s knockout musical-theater performances, the kind that wins fans and garners industry attention. “To be able to work with such incredible material, to really get to show all parts of my vocals and my acting, it’s all in there,” she said.

Now in there, too, is her Tony nomination for best featured actress in a musical, a public validation of exceptional artistry, a note to self that the wait was worth it. (The awards in 26 categories, honoring plays and musicals of the 2022-23 season, will be handed out on June 11.) It meant a lot to Milligan that old friends came over to her place last month with coffee and bagels to watch the nominations being announced. “It was really special,” she said, “because I was surrounded with people who know what the struggle has been.”

Award euphoria may be ephemeral, but for actors like Milligan, the career impact is seismic. The recognition feels especially hard-earned for the 20 performers who are nominated in the four Tony Awards featured, or supporting acting, categories in part because the competition for those slots is more intense. Far more performances in a Broadway season qualify as featured rather than leading roles, and the leading categories are normally reserved for actors whose names appear above the show title. (The Tony Awards administration committee rules in the borderline instances when producers ask for performers to be moved into a lead or featured category regardless of billing.)

The reality is that the media spotlight shines hotter on the more rarefied leading actor races, which tend to highlight bigger celebrities. This year, Jessica Chastain, Audra McDonald, Sean Hayes, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban and Sara Bareilles are among the 20 nominees for leading actor and actress in a play and musical.

But the less oft-told tales of how actors under the title make it into the Tony tent are equally, if not more, compelling. Hearing from these nominees offers a window on how the building of an entire career makes a shining featured moment possible. I spoke to Milligan and three others, one from each featured acting category, recently in New York.

Brandon Uranowitz, featured actor in a play, for ‘Leopoldstadt’

The first day Tom Stoppard came into the rehearsal room, Brandon Uranowitz was a wreck. “That was the most nervous I’ve ever been my whole life,” Uranowitz recalled. A run-through was on the schedule for his epic drama about a Viennese Jewish family before, during and after the Holocaust, and Uranowitz had two meaty roles: Ludwig, a mathematician in late 19th-century Austria, and later on Nathan, a Holocaust survivor.

The run-through was Stoppard’s initial experience of the Broadway cast, a successor to the London original production. “But he was weeping at the end,” Uranowitz said. “So I was like, ‘Well, if the man who wrote these words, who has seen it fully fleshed out, and he’s still moved? We’re doing something right.’”

Of the 30 actors in the play, Uranowitz was the only one to get a Tony nomination, a remarkable distinction, but not his first time up for a featured actor Tony. He also received nods in 2015 (“An American in Paris”), 2017 (“Falsettos”) and 2019 (“Burn This”). Still, he is in such an insecure line of work that even those laurels, in the most varied assortment of plays and musicals you could imagine, did not shore up doubts going into “Leopoldstadt.” “I felt like I had a lot to prove, despite having three Tony nominations,” he said, adding, “I know, I know” after he saw my look of incredulity.

Uranowitz, 36, grew up in suburban New Jersey in a cultured Jewish family that supported his aspirations. I first saw him in 2013, when he played Arnold Becker to inspired effect in Studio Theatre’s revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy.” He is often cast in Jewish roles, which naturally has compelled him to a deeper investigation of his identity. And why the debate Ludwig has in “Leopoldstadt” with a Christianized family member struck him as one of the most searing moments of the play.

“The thing that really drew me was that argument about assimilation,” he said. “It’s a question that I have been struggling with as a Jewish actor who, for the most part, has only played Jewish characters. It’s a question that I’ve never actually seen interrogated in any sort of theatrical way like this.”

Nikki Crawford, featured actress in a play, for ‘Fat Ham’

Nikki Crawford is as engagingly elegant in conversation as Tedra, her character in “Fat Ham,” is effortlessly outrageous. That surprising dichotomy helps explain why she has scored a Tony nod for her Broadway debut in James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, about a Black family living in a North Carolina suburb whose wildly dysfunctional lineage seems traceable back to a castle in Elsinore.

Crawford, 49, grew up in D.C. and Maryland in a multigenerational musical family: Her father, a jazz musician, played with the soul singer Donny Hathaway. “Oscar Peterson used to come over and play the piano when I was a child,” she said. That bit of biography puts in context the range in a résumé that stretches from Shakespeare to Eric Idle.

A graduate of Carnegie Mellon, Crawford played another outrageous character, the Lady of the Lake, in the Las Vegas company of Idle’s “Monty Python’s Spamalot.” It was then that “Spamalot’s” storied director, Mike Nichols, shared some wisdom about being funny that Crawford has never forgotten. “He said, ‘With comedy, if the jokes are written properly, and the setup is executed properly, just speak the truth,’” she recalled.

The advice serves Crawford well in “Fat Ham.” Tedra is Ijames’s stand-in for “Hamlet’s” Gertrude, the mom to Marcel Spears’s melancholy Juicy, enraged by Tedra’s quick turnaround marriage to his uncle (Billy Eugene Jones), murderer of Juicy’s father (also played by Jones). Tedra’s truth spoke to Crawford, in fact, from the moment the actress received the script for the Public Theater’s 2022 off-Broadway production. (It opened at Broadway’s American Airlines Theater in April.)

“You can dislike her because of the bad choices she makes,” Crawford said. “But you understand why she makes the choices because of the set of circumstances that are given to her, just like all of us. Our circumstances are different, and we all make different choices. But you know, we don’t always make great choices.”

Trusting her choices, though, got her the part. Just as Nichols might have advised her, she went for big and boisterous on her audition tape, and then worried a bit that it was too much. Instead, director Saheem Ali told her, “I knew from that first tape that you were Tedra.” Crawford said she learned from that, noting, “If it feels right, do it.”

Kevin Cahoon, featured actor in a musical, for ‘Shucked’

Kevin Cahoon’s long association with this affectionately funny musical satire, about a Heartland town trying to save its corn crop, is a lesson in loyalty. He has been with the project through all the stages of its development for a decade.

At the outset, “it was called ‘Hee-Haw,’” he recalled, after the cornball television series. “It became ‘Moonshine, That Hee-Haw Musical.’ Then it became just ‘Moonshine.’ And then finally it found its name.” Along the way, Cahoon said, “we did the O’Neill Festival in Connecticut, we did countless readings and workshops. It’s a miracle anything gets produced. There were so many roadblocks.”

Somehow, though, Cahoon surmounted the obstacles and stuck with the show — the one original cast member to do so — playing Peanut, a dispenser of cracked country wisdom, courtesy of book writer Robert Horn. And delivered with such a sublime ear (oops) that the role has accorded him his crowning glory: a Tony nomination, alongside castmate Alex Newell.

It’s a gratifying milestone for Cahoon, 51, who has been performing practically his entire life, though it began far from Broadway, in his native Texas, in the company of cows and horses. His father made a living in rodeos as a calf roper. “I was the world’s youngest rodeo clown from the time I was 5 to 15,” he said. “We did the whole circuit in Oklahoma and Texas.”

That kind of gratification extends to how audiences relate to “Shucked,” whether they’re inveterate theatergoers or first-timers. “So many people after the show will say, ‘We’re from Nebraska, we’re from Ohio. We have never seen ourselves represented in a Broadway show.’ That’s the magic of this show.”

The actor who trained in New York University’s acting program likes to reflect on how he has come full circle. “Every weekend we would load up the horse trailer and go. So my performing career began in a pair of cowboy boots, telling jokes to an announcer in an arena. And now I think, ‘Oh, I’m still standing in these cowboy boots, telling jokes!’”

Bonnie Milligan, featured actress in a musical, for ‘Kimberly Akimbo’

“We were in the trenches together, selling hamburgers to rich Upper West Siders and just commiserating with each other for many years,” recalled Kennedy Kanagawa, an actor now on tour, puppeteering Milky White in the revival of “Into the Woods.” He and Milligan became friends when they were waiters at the Landmarc, Marc Murphy’s restaurant in the Time Warner Building that closed in 2019.

That they’re both now making a living as Broadway actors is of course an invigorating happy ending, or happy midpoint, at least. The rise has been especially poignant for Milligan, who grew up in modest circumstances in Illinois and Ohio. (Her theater degree is from Ohio State.) Like the other “featured” actors in this story, she found an essence in a Broadway role that raises a well-etched character on a page to someone irresistible on a stage.

Debra is the untamed id of “Kimberly Akimbo,” the story of Debra’s niece, a teenage girl played by a 60-something actress, Victoria Clark, who has a disease that ages her at four to five times the normal rate. Milligan’s ability is in making Debra’s antisocial behavior a lovable model for exactly the person Clark’s Kimberly doesn’t want to be.

Milligan recalled a public event during which the show’s creators, book writer and lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire and composer Jeanine Tesori, described how Milligan had added her own deft take to the character. “They said Debbie used to always be a steamroller, and that I was very different. Janine described me as a pickpocket,” the actress said. “They said she’s a pickpocket, but you don’t realize your wallet was stolen.”

What a great analogy for the way an actor can steal your heart. We’ll have to see whether, as with these other deserving actors, she steals the hearts of Tony voters, too.