NEED TO KNOW
- Ariel Winter opens up about her time on Modern Family, and what life has been like since it ended
- She says she loved working on Modern Family, and is also excited to return to Sofia the First, in which she voices the titular princess
- She also shares which cast member she keeps in touch with the most from her Modern Family days
When scrolling through the TV channels, trying to figure out what to watch, more often than not you’ll stumble across a rerun of the hit ABC sitcom, Modern Family. So when it happens to Ariel Winter, who played Alex Dunphy on the series for 11 seasons, does she stop to watch?
“I actually don’t,” Winter, 27, tells PEOPLE with a laugh. “I’m like a crime documentary procedural show kind of girl,” she says. “I’m in on all the dark shows.”
That doesn’t mean she didn’t love working on the hit series, which ran between 2009 to 2020.
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“I was 11 when it started, and I don’t think I had any idea of whether it was going to be successful or not,” she says. “I was just like, ‘Oh, awesome, I got a job.'” She laughs and says, “What I was so excited for was to get the chance to work with Al Bundy [Ed O’Neill, who played her grandfather, Jay Pritchett].”
Of course, the show, which won 22 Emmys over its course, was a huge success.
“Once the show started, it was an immediate hit, and it was so exciting to have that opportunity. And being on the same show for so long? I feel like that doesn’t really happen anymore,” she says.
Now Winter, who left Los Angeles and is working on producing, developing a cooking show and will return to voice Sofia the First next year, says she’d go back to a network show if one came calling. “Even though it was 22 episodes a season, it wasn’t bad!” she says of the Modern Family hours. “Sometimes we’d just work from 6 a.m.- 1 p.m. But towards the end, the days got longer.”
“I didn’t leave the industry,” she adds, noting that she still loves acting and still misses her castmates.
“We were like a real family,” she says. “So it was weird knowing it would just be over, and I wouldn’t get to see everybody all the time anymore. It was like, ‘Wait, yeah, wait, we’re not going to be together on Monday?’ So on the one hand, I didn’t want it to end.” She adds, “At the same time, I was ready to start something new as an adult.”
She says she’s stayed tight with her onscreen brother, Nolan Gould. “I’m extremely close to Nolan,” Winter says. “He plays my little brother, and he and I are still best friends.”
These days, Winter is focusing on a surprising new passion: fighting against online sexual predators. One night, she and her boyfriend Luke Benward were watching TV and came upon Max’s Undercover Underage, which followed an organization called SOSA (Safe From Online Sex Abuse).
The group acts as decoys to lure in Internet pedophiles and then works with local law enforcement and vice squads to arrange in-person meetings and get the perpetrators arrested.
“I was just like, ‘God, I’d love to be a part of that,’” says Winter, who referred to herself as “a victim of grooming online and IRL [in real life] and CSA [child sex abuse]” in an Instagram comment earlier this year but declined to share any further details.
“It just impacted me so deeply because I’d been that kid who’d been preyed upon online so many times.”
She’s thrilled to be a part of something that helps so many people. “My journey to figuring things out and healing is now through helping other people. That’s all I care about.”
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