Ty Burrell Felt “Emotionally 18” As Modern Family Finished Filming

Ty Burrell is just one of the many stars of Modern Family who’s feeling all the feelings as the show comes to an end. 

Filming was completed on the series finale a couple of weeks ago, and Burrell spoke about the emotions that come along with that in an appearance on Good Morning America on Tuesday, comparing it to high school graduation. 

“I think the closest analogue I can come up with is sort of like when you graduate from high school, because we’ve been together for basically that amount of time, right? So it’s felt like kind of all the feelings. There’s a lot of sadness, but there’s a lot of gratitude and you feel emotionally 18, and everybody’s sort of overpromising like in high school where you’re like, I’m gonna see you every day. We’re still gonna talk, we’re gonna have coffee every weekend.” 

Burrell’s character Phil Dunphy is a clumsy father of three, and now grandfather to twins, and Burrell is both clumsy and a father in real life, though his daughters, who are currently eight and 10, are aware enough to know that Sarah Hyland, Ariel Winter, and Nolan Gould are not their real-life siblings. 

Burrell’s clumsiness, however, has confused both fans and his family. 

“I hadn’t really done a lot of physical comedy before this show, but I am clumsy. I’m a clumsy person. I always have been clumsy. I’ve been tripping and falling in public my whole life,” he said. “The only difference really is that after doing it for 11 years on the show, now when I trip and fall in public, people think I’m doing it on purpose. Like I’ll stumble, and this happened after season five or six, somebody would be like, oh yeah, that guy.” 

“It’s actually gotten so bad that this week, and this is a true story, I was playing tag with my daughters after dinner, and I was running at full speed, and I tripped and fell and had like a really hard fall, like I flipped over on the ground, on a public sidewalk,” he said. “And I looked up and my own family thought I was doing it on purpose. My wife and daughters were like, daddy, just gosh, he loves attention.” 

Burrell also spoke about how he planned to quit acting before he got the job as Phil, though he didn’t really have a backup plan.

“My wife and I actually sat down at one point to kind of like come up with a list of other things that I could do because I was thinking about getting out of acting,” he said, but what did the list include? “Nothing. I had nothing. I have no other skillset.” 

Currently, Burrell lends his voice to Fox’s Duncanville, and he says he just signed a deal to start developing shows for Disney, after he takes “a little bit of a sabbatical” from live action TV. 

Modern Family returns with new episodes on March 18, and the hour-long finale airs April 8 on ABC, followed by a special with Jimmy Kimmel.