He’s a podcast host, LGBTQ+ rights advocate, business owner, cookbook author, and Broadway actor, but he is best known for his role as Mitchell Pritchett in ABC’s sitcom “Modern Family.”
Jesse Tyler Ferguson took to the IU Auditorium stage Tuesday night as a part of the “Speaking of Excellence” lecture series, which previously brought in speakers like “Euphoria” actress Hunter Schafer and “Star Trek” actor George Takei.
Union Board President Laurie Frederickson welcomed the enthusiastic crowd of about 700. After an introduction by musical theater major Jonah Broscow, who briefly covered Ferguson’s history as a Tony Award-winning actor and long-time advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, Ferguson peeked out of the wings to resounding applause.
He sat between moderators Brayton Rose, the vice president of external affairs for the Union Board, and Marcus Wilson, a Union Board Lectures Committee member, who asked Ferguson questions ranging from his favorite quick dinners to his experiences as an openly gay actor.
Ferguson said growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a closeted kid attending a Catholic high school was difficult for him, and he found refuge in an unlikely place: onstage.
“That fear, of not feeling like I could be who I felt like I was inside, was such a motivation for me to discover a group of people that did make me feel safe,” Ferguson said. “For me, those people were theater people.”
He said he had to constantly search for people who understood him as child, which motivated him to tell stories about the LGBTQ+ community through his work.
In his role as Pritchett on “Modern Family,” he played a gay man in a secure relationship at a time when, when the show first aired in 2009, gay marriage was not legal at the federal level in the United States.
“When I read the pilot script from ‘Modern Family,’ I thought, ‘Oh god, this is the couple that I wish I had seen on my TV,’” Ferguson said. “‘This role, if this show does well, will be that couple for kids like me to look up to.’”
Ferguson said he got married to his husband Justin Mikita the same year that his character Pritchett did on the show—2013 — though the finale in which Pritchett had his wedding did not air until 2014. Gay marriage did not become legal across all 50 states until the following year.
“Jesse got married before Mitchell,” Ferguson said. “I got married that summer, and then over the next two weeks, there were these episodes leading up to Mitchell getting married. And I just thought, ‘Wow, this is an incredible moment that I got to be a part of.’”
Ferguson and Mikita co-founded a foundation supporting LGBTQ+ rights called Tie the Knot in 2012, which sold bow ties to raise over a million dollars for charities that advocated for gay marriage.
Now called Pronoun, the foundation aims to educate and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. He said his dream would be for the business to go out of business — for the organization to not be needed anymore — but said they still had work to do fighting for women’s and trans rights.
During the hour-long interview, Ferguson discussed how his “Modern Family” character’s daughter, Lily, prepared him for fatherhood. He talked about balancing his work as an actor with being a father to two sons and feeling pigeonholed into his character Pritchett.
“It’s a double-edged sword, because it was such a great job for 11 years,” Ferguson said. “But it has been harder for me to have people look at me in a different way for other jobs that I think I’m also capable of doing.”
In her interview for the same lecture series last year, Hunter Schafer similarly spoke on typecasting and looking for roles that didn’t solely center on transness. Typecasting is when actors are cast repeatedly in similar roles — for Ferguson, that of a worried gay man like his "Modern Family" character.
When asked if he had any advice for IU theater, arts, or entertainment students struggling with self-doubt, Ferguson said that he felt doubt and fear were important motivations.
“Being scared about things only means that you care, and when those things disappear, I kind of take it as a bad sign that I’m too comfortable and I’m not caring about something,” Ferguson said. “I feel like I’m going to be one of those people that always doubts myself a little bit.”
Since starring in “Modern Family,” Ferguson won a Tony Award for his role in off-Broadway play “Take Me Out” and was featured in movies “Cocaine Bear” and “All That We Love.” Recently, he’s hosted a celebrity podcast called “Dinner’s on Me.”
In the future, he hopes to try directing, and will perform alongside Peter Dinklage and Sandra Oh at Shakespeare in the Park in New York City next summer.
