Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson remembers his dad once asking him why he played “so many gay parts.”
“My family, they went through their own process with me being gay,” Ferguson said on Tuesday’s edition of his Dinner’s On Me podcast. “And my dad even asked me, while I was doing Modern Family, he’s like, ‘I just don’t always understand why you have played so many gay parts.’ And it opened up a whole conversation between the two of us and started a whole other level of our relationship, because I had to sort of explain to him why it was important for me to play this role, because, socially, I wanted to be able to portray a gay man on television. I felt like it was gonna do wonderful things for the marriage equality movement, which it did.”
Peter “Hopper” Stone/ABC
Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson on ‘Modern Family’
Ferguson was 33 by the time the Emmy-winning series, on which he played Mitchell Pritchett, who’s married to a man, Eric Stonestreet‘s Cam Tucker, debuted on ABC in 2009. Not only was it a hit with viewers because it was funny, but it was lauded, too, for depicting positive images of a gay couple before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 and that gay characters in general were hugely underrepresented.
Feguson had long ago explained to his father that he was gay, but the actor said “it was another thing for me then to be doing that on a major network.”
In October 2013, Ferguson told Oprah Winfrey that he’d known since childhood that he was gay, but he’d had to tell his parents three times for them to fully grasp it. He recalled that he was 17, 19, and 21 when he spoke to them about the subject.
“The last was, he asked me if I had a girlfriend. I was like, ‘Dad! I’m gay. Do we really have to go back to this every time?'” Ferguson told Winfrey. “It was a process for him as well. It was sort of a coming-out process, and he had to figure out how to deal with having a son that wasn’t the ideal son. He had this whole idea of what his son was gonna be, and he had to reconfigure his thinking.”
Mitch Haddad/ABC
#39;Modern Family’ stars Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet played a married couple
On his podcast, Ferguson bonded with his guest, actor Luke Macfarlane (Brothers and Sisters), over the demands of a job in public and what it means for their personal lives.
“I’m sure your parents were the same way. You know, their careers didn’t beg for us to be so open with [themselves],” Ferguson said. “And even I’m still learning how to open up in ways. I still have to keep parts of myself private.”
But that’s not always easy.
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“We’re expected in this industry to go on talk shows and talk about our personal life and to, you know, expose parts of ourselves for roles. And it’s something that I think for my dad specifically…it’s still a hard thing for him to understand,” Ferguson said. “If I go on a talk show and tell a story about the family, it’s like, ‘Why did you have to share that?’ And I was like, ‘Well, because it’s a charming story about my life, and I’m just sharing a little bit of myself with people who wanna know something about me.”
He concluded that it’s a “tricky” balancing act.
Since his hit sitcom, Ferguson, who has been married to Justin Mikita since 2013, has gone on professionally to appear in projects such as the 2023 movie Cocaine Bear and TV’s Elsbeth and Mid-Century Modern.
Listen to the full conversation above.
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