Modern Family is one of the best sitcoms of all time, and fans continue to re-watch it in the years since it wrapped. The Modern Family cast was stacked, and actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson earned five consecutive Emmy nominations for playing Mitchell Pritchett. And he recently opened up about a conversation he had with his father about playing gay roles, and how ultimately it brought him together.
Modern Family (which is streaming with a Hulu subscription) first came out back in 2009, before marriage equality and conversations about LGBTQ+ representation in the media. On a recent episode of his podcast Dinner’s On Me with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, he told guest Luke Macfarlane about how his father originally struggled in seeing him play queer characters… especially on TV. In the actor’s own words:
My family, they went through their own process with me being gay. My dad even asked me, while I was doing Modern Family, he’s like, ‘I just don’t always understand why you have to play 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 to me to play this role.
This is likely a sentiment that many queer people know all too well. There are sometimes stages to acceptance for families of LGBTQ+ people, especially when there’s a generational gap. And when Ferguson’s father had questions and concerns about him playing Mitch on TV, it actually opened up the opportunity for them to have an honest conversation.
While Ferguson has played straight roles before, he definitely has played some very memorable queer men. That includes playing Carl Dad in the original Broadway cast of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, as well as his recent Tony-winning performance in Take Me Out. Later in the podcast, the actor shared why taking the role in Modern Family was so important to him at the time. As he put it:
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. It was one thing for him to accept me being gay quietly, but it was another thing for me then to be doing that on a major network. And there are steps to acceptance.
While the actors from Modern Family bonded in their years on the show, it sounds like it also brought Ferguson and his father closer together. And like he said, portraying a healthy same-sex relationship for the show’s long tenure on the air did help to open and change minds. After all, the sitcom was wildly popular.
Indeed, the world (and TV industry) changed throughout Modern Family‘s whopping 11-season fun. Audiences noticed that Mitchell and Cam were far less affectionate than the other couples, which seemingly inspired the show to finally show the two men kissing. The characters’ wedding was also another major milestone, especially after marriage equality was finally passed in the United States.
Modern Family is streaming in its entirety on Hulu and new episodes of Dinner’s On Me premiere Tuesdays. Unfortunately, Mitch and Cam’s spinoff isn’t happening anymore.
