Jesse Tyler Ferguson recalls facing the ‘loudest’ criticism from gay viewers while he was on ‘Modern Family’

By Alli Rosenbloom, CNN

(CNN) — Jesse Tyler Ferguson is opening up about some criticism he received while playing a gay character on “Modern Family” that hit particularly close to home.

Ferguson shared that some of his “loudest” critics came from the gay community itself, which is a pressure that he said he tends to feel frequently during Monday’s episode of his podcast “Dinner’s on Me” with his guest, British actor Russell Tovey.

“One of the pressures I’ve always felt, specifically after being on a show like ‘Modern Family,’ where I’m portraying a gay man on a television show on (a) network that is as popular as it is, is that you receive criticism, as you do with anything you do,” he said, adding that “the criticism that I think I heard at the loudest was always from the gay community.”

Ferguson said he’d get criticism from some “feeling as if maybe I didn’t represent their idea of what a gay relationship was or a gay man was, which I always took with such a grain of salt because I’m representing one person, I’m in charge of this one character.”

“How can you be everything for everyone?” he asked.

His played Mitchell Pritchett on the popular ABC sitcom, a gay lawyer married to Eric Stonestreet’s Cameron Tucker.

While he was portraying this one specific character, Ferguson said that Pritchett was, at the same time, “a shade of who I was, so… if it’s stereotypical, I’m basically playing myself, so I guess, guilty, guilty as charged.”

Ferguson was nominated for five Emmys for his performance in the series, which aired from 2000 to 2009.

Off screen, Ferguson is married to real-life lawyer Justin Mikita. The couple share two sons, Beckett and Sullivan, who were born in 2020 and 2022 respectively.

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