Jesse Tyler Ferguson was on the fence about a Modern Family spinoff.
Ferguson, 50, opened up about the idea of a Modern Family reboot with his on-screen husband Eric Stonestreet during a Thursday, March 5, episode of his “Dinner’s On Me” podcast.
“Modern Family ended and then we had a pandemic, you know. I was so excited for this next chapter of my life, and then it was like, everyone go inside,” he said, noting that producers were “brewing this idea of maybe doing a Modern Family spinoff with [him and Stonestreet].”
“I was interested,” Ferguson recalled. “But I was also supposed to do this play in New York,” he explained, “It sort of felt like, as the reality of, maybe the spinoff was actually going to happen, I literally felt like, Oh my god, I want to date other people.”
Ferguson said that after playing Mitchell Pritchett, who was married to Cameron Tucker (Stonestreet) for more a decade, he was ready to explore other roles. He wanted to “feel what it’s like not to do that.” Ferguson added, “It ended up not working out.”
If the spinoff had been created, fans would have seen Ferguson and Stonestreet, 54, reprise their roles as Mitch and Cam as they moved to Missouri.
Stonestreet shared his own thoughts on the spinoff while chatting with Graham Bensinger in 2024. “Chris Lloyd and a couple of the writers wrote a really great script that spun Jesse and I off in our life in Missouri,” he shared, noting that Cam grew up on a farm there. “And [ABC] said, ‘No.’ They just said, ‘We don’t want to do it.’”
He added, “I love my character. I love the show. I love Jesse. We had a great working relationship, we had amazing chemistry. I think Jesse and I maybe felt like they thought of us as the old guys, or something like that, that didn’t seem worthy of keeping those characters going. It felt a little hurtful. But people make business decisions.”
Ferguson and Stonestreet starred on Modern Family for 11 seasons from 2009 through 2020. The rest of the main cast included Julie Bowen (Claire Dunphy), Ty Berrell (Phil Dunphy), Sarah Hyland (Haey Dunphy), Ariel Winter (Alex Dunphy) and Noland Gould (Luke Dunphy). Sofia Vergara (Gloria Delago-Pritchett), Ed O’Neill (Jay Pritchett) and Rico Rodriguez (Manny Delgado), also starred. Aubrey Anderson-Emmons also played Mitch and Cam’s adopted daughter, Lily Tucker-Pritchett.
