How a Modern Family Co-Star Inspired Eric Stonestreet's Love Life

Modern Family changed Eric Stonestreet's life in more ways than one. The sitcom made the Kansas City-born actor into a star after he was cast to play the irreverent family man Cameron Tucker in 2009. He won back-to-back Emmys for the performance the following two years, but it wasn't until the middle of his decade-long Modern Family run that another change came upon him. "I had this really vivid moment at a CAA Emmy party," Stonestreet told his former on-screen husband, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, on a recent episode of his Dinner's On Me podcast. "Ty Burrell and [his wife Holly Burrell], Rich Sommer and his wife were over there sitting down. I'm bebopping around the room, talking to people and meeting people and doing what you do. And I have this very distinct memory of looking over and being like, 'I want to be those people.'" "I know you relate to this, which is I just didn't want somebody that wanted to be at the party more than me," Stonestreet told Ferguson, who said he understood the sentiment that as a public figure, you need someone grounded as a counterweight. Ferguson added that he has always been "very grateful that I met [husband Justin Mikita] at the beginning of the Modern Family journey," else he would have had a lot more dinners like the kind Stonestreet described. I just remember thinking, 'That's what I want to do," Stonestreet continued. "I've told Ty, I told him that when I called to tell him that we're getting married. I said, you don't know it, but you and Holly... are very prominent in me getting on the direction of what I wanted to do." Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter. The Burrells met in the 1990s, when they were both aspiring actors in Washington, D.C. They secretly married in 2000, and eventually adopted daughters Frances and Greta. Ty told Redbook in 2010 that he knew he wanted to marry Holly "on our first date. I was slow on the uptake, so it took me a couple of years." That date? "It was the opening night of a play we were in. We were understudying lovers in Twelfth Night." Stonestreet, meanwhile, met pediatric nurse Lindsay Schweitzer at a charity event in their hometown of Kansas City in 2016. Like Burrell, it was love at first sight. The couple were engaged in 2020 and were married in a surprise ceremony in 2025. "When I found out that you were getting married, you called me the day before, or maybe two days before," Ferguson recounted to Stonestreet, who explained, "I hate saying it, but we didn't invite anyone to our wedding other than our family. So the equivalent to an invitation to our wedding was a phone call before the wedding, which was like, 'Hey, this is your non-invitation, but this is because we love you and we want you to know about it first.'" You can listen to Stonestreet and Ferguson's full conversation on Dinner's On Me above.