Ty Burrell has opened up about his decision to leave Los Angeles for Salt Lake City after wrapping up the final season of Modern Family. The 57-year-old actor, who played Phil Dunphy for 11 seasons, moved to Utah with his wife Holly and their two daughters shortly after the show ended in 2020.
“It's just been spectacular,” Burrell told People in an interview published on Sunday. “We moved here right after [Modern Family] ended, and I don't have any regrets. It's been lovely and a great place to raise the kids.”
The Finding Dory voice actor admitted that adjusting from city life to the more rural Utah took time. “My parents weren’t really those kinds of people,” he said of living in the mountains. “So at first, when we moved here, it almost felt like cosplay, like we were pretending to be people who were outdoorsy, and now we really truly love it.”
Burrell is not the only Modern Family star to leave California. Ariel Winter, who played his on-screen daughter, also relocated earlier this year. In a May 2025 interview with People, she cited severe childhood trauma and negative press as reasons for her move. “It was every headline I read about myself, like, grown people writing articles about me saying how I looked terrible or pregnant or like a fat slut. I mean, I was 14. It totally damaged my self-esteem,” she said.
Winter, now 27, left Los Angeles with her boyfriend, actor Luke Benward, after Modern Family ended. She stressed that she is not leaving the industry, only the city. “It holds some not-great memories for me, and I’m young and never lived anywhere else, and thought, ‘Why not?’ If you’re no longer on a network show that shoots there, you don’t really have to be there, and if I get a network show, I can easily go back,” she explained.
