This interview was originally published on 27 March, 2014. It has been republished it after Ty Burrell won an Emmy Award for his performance in Modern Family.

Ty Burrell is not an especially funny man. He’s sorry about that. “I don’t want to let anyone down here,” he says with a rueful grin. “When you get on a comedy show, people assume you’re a comedian. I’d say I’m more of a comedy nerd.”

He certainly looks the part, wearing geek-chic glasses, with thick, square frames. Add to that a decidedly thoughtful demeanour, and the resemblance between Burrell and the character that made him famous – Modern Family’s farcical “cool dad”, Phil Dunphy – soon begins to fade.

And yet, as Burrell fusses around me in the Los Angeles hotel suite where we have met, administering to every social nicety expected of a host putting a guest at ease, it becomes clear that, like Dunphy, he is a man who genuinely cares about people. And like his well-meaning but disaster-prone character, he’s also upbeat, amiable, and so nice it knocks you sideways. He’s just not stupid. Dunphy, on the other hand, has a Tumblr account dedicated to his “Phil’s-osophies” – “Dance until your feet hurt. Sing until your lungs hurt. Act until you’re William Hurt.”

But the qualities Burrell does share with his character aren’t lost on the actor. Five years into playing television’s most successful sitcom dad since Bill Cosby, he’s sometimes unsure where the definition lines are himself. “I think there is no way to play Phil Dunphy for all this time and not have the character have some impact on your nature, or your outlook,” he says, with that familiar deep voice that makes you want to duck from flying objects. “Phil’s such a well-meaning, optimistic, good person. I consider myself incredibly lucky to play him. I don’t know what it’s like to go to work and play a serial killer for five years. I can’t imagine it’s as much fun.”

The Phil’s-osophy Tumblr account is typical of America’s ever-growing obsession with Modern Family. The most successful comedy to come out of America since Friends, the mockumentary, which follows one family split into three different households, is now in its fifth season, pulling in more than 12 million viewers each episode. It has won 18 Emmys including the award for Outstanding Comedy Series four years in a row, and given Burrell the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in 2011.

^{The cast of Modern Family (© 2013 Fox)}

But the show is a significant one for more reasons than simply audience numbers and critical acclaim. Created by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, the team behind Frasier, it’s a show that is pushing television boundaries and, in its own quiet way, changing political viewpoints. Right wing conservatives, including Mitt Romney and his wife, are said to be fans and, in a recent survey, Republicans ranked the show third in a list of their top 15 shows, while Democrats didn’t rank it at all. All rather surprising, given the inclusion of a gay couple with a baby as one of the family units.

“This is probably a little overwrought, but I do actually think the writers are making the world a better place,” Burrell says earnestly. “It’s one of my favourite things about the show. I love it when I talk to conservatives and they’re describing all three couples, and they never mention that one of them is gay. That’s the brilliance of the writing. In a completely unaggressive, apolitical way, they are showing this couple as completely normal dealing with ordinary stuff. The banality of it is the most revolutionary thing.

“I think if you turned around and asked that same conservative person how they felt about gay marriage, that probably hasn’t changed for them, but the seed has been planted none the less. It’s progress and it’s the coolest thing.”

Talking about the show, he admits, is one of his favourite pastimes, and he’s clearly very serious about it. “I think the television world has become a more permissive place,” he continues. “I don’t even think we’re a particularly edgy show, but I’m amazed sometimes, in a good way, at what we’re allowed to express. The kids are coming of age on the show, so we’re addressing puberty, masturbation, drinking, the first time a young woman has sex. These are the kinds of things parents are dealing with all the time, and I know the fans appreciate it, because people talk about  it.”

With his eyebrows that so nearly meet, and creases etched deep around his smile, 46-year-old Burrell shows all the signs of middle age. But he’s not worried. His mature features allow him to play Dunphy, and one gets the feeling he is still unreservedly grateful for that. After all, his forties nearly turned out very differently. Five years ago – broke, burned out and going nowhere – Burrell was about to quit acting, when he auditioned for Modern Family. He now commands around £106,000 an episode, with 24 airing episodes each season, and happily admits that his is a rags to riches story. As Dunphy might say, “When life gives you lemonade, make lemons. Life will be all like, ‘What?!’”

Raised in Oregon with his older brother, his father was a family therapist, and his mother a housewife. “Our house was a place where you were welcome to make an idiot out of yourself. Silliness was valued. My dad worked with foster kids in the foster care system, and I think silliness was a way for him to leaven things up. So when he came home, it was generally a competition at the dinner table between me and my brother, Duncan, to see who could crack him up.”

Burrell was hopeless at school. “I don’t know why, but it seems to be a common story for actors and comedians to have a tendency to be bad students and have difficulty focusing on things.” His best memory was a high school talent show, where he found being on stage to be “a blissful experience”. “My dad was really struck by my performance. I think he knew that’s what I was best suited for. But I was too scared. The crazy thing is my dad never saw me perform professionally.”

It was only when Burrell’s father died from cancer that he went back to college and signed up for drama. He was 19. “Up until that point, I was doing very little,” he says. “I was a little bit lost. I’d flunked out of school. I’d backed away from the challenge of acting. Dad passed away in July, and in September I went back to college. Suddenly, I got very, very interested in learning. If you find something that you love, then everything gets fired up.”

Theatre jobs followed, and it was during one of these that he met his wife, Holly, a fellow actress at the time. “She came to live with me, against her parents wishes, in a roach-infested old army bunker in Mississippi when I was doing a terrible production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I proposed to her by the luggage racks. I always knew she loved me for who I was, because it clearly wasn’t for anything else,” he laughs.

^{Ty Burrell and his wife Holly at the 2013 Emmy Awards (REX)}

A decade or so, later they were still only just getting by. Although Burrell had landed many television parts, and solid roles in films like Black Hawk Down, the Diana Arbus biopic Fur, and Dawn of the Dead (a cult zombie movie, whose fans still stop him in the street), the big break was elusive. “I was running out of nerve,” he says. “The audition thing is emotionally exhausting. Four or five auditions a week, knowing that the odds of getting the job are around one or two per cent. That much failure was getting to me.”

He and Holly had already moved out of New York, back to Utah where she was from, and he was contemplating a new career when Modern Family sprang to life. “I have no idea what I thought I was going to do, because I genuinely don’t have another skill set,” he says. “People give me credit for being persistent, but it’s not really persistence when you’ve got no other options.”

Did he ever expect Modern Family to be the phenomenon it is? He says he could only hope. But he recalls that pinch-me moment when he realised how popular he personally had become. “I was driving home from work, sitting at a stoplight, and there was this woman waving at me from the next car. I thought there was something wrong with my car. But it turns out she was saying ‘I love you’, and she wouldn’t stop waving. Unfortunately, we were at a T-junction – my lane had to go right, hers to the left. But as the lights turned green, she’s still continuing to yell ‘I love you’, at me and driving forward, but there was no lane for her to go into. I had to stop my car and point this out to her. Luckily there was no accident, but it came close.”

These days, he has every actor’s dream – a steady job with a contract that is not due to expire for another three years – but the film offers are also flooding in. This month, he appears alongside Ricky Gervais and Tina Fey as a work-shy French Interpol inspector in Muppets Most Wanted and he recently voiced the animated dog, Mr Peabody, in DreamWorks’ Mr Peabody and Sherman. Next up are roles in drama Skeleton Twins with Bill Hader and Pixar’s Finding Dory, in which he plays a whale named Bailey. “Just for this window in time, I’m trying to make my decisions based on joy and picking work that looks like it will be a great experience,” he says of his recent choices. “Not just because I need the job.”

Much of the filming for the Muppets movie took place in London – six weeks of heaven, according to Burrell, who admits to being something of an Anglophile. “Everything about the Brits makes me laugh. I grew up on Monty Python. Actually, I have a bit of a complex about it, because I think British actors and comedians are amazingly talented, and it all happens at such a high level. I was a little intimidated to meet Ricky, because he’s so sharp and quick, and likes to take the p--- out of people.

“But my impression of him is that all he wants to do is laugh. I don’t think I’ve met as many people who love to laugh as much as he does. If you start doing bits with him, he’ll roll with them forever.” Bits? “Bits are like schtick…you start on a comic tangent and you start riffing on the tangent. With Ricky, an hour will pass, and he’ll keep spinning it into something else. It’s really my favourite way to spend the day. My brother and I are happy to do ‘bits’ all day long.”

^{Ty Burrell as Jean Pierre Napoleon in Muppets: Most Wanted}

Family is clearly important to Burrell. And not just his television one. He and his wife, now a pastry chef, have two girls, aged two and four, who they adopted because, Burrell says, he has “apathetic sperm”. They travel as a family, splitting their time between Utah and Culver City, a low-key, family neighbourhood in Los Angeles. “I’m incredibly spoilt in that our show shoots banker’s hours. I’m usually home by four in the afternoon, and that’s unheard of in television. When I run into other actors at events, I have play it up and say ‘Oh God this schedule is just brutal’, because you don’t want people to hate you. But it means I have plenty of time to be a human jungle gym for my kids. If you were to ask me what’s my perfect evening, it would be a game on television, because I am an obsessive sports fanatic, playing with the kids and barbecuing.”

He is close to the rest of his family too, particularly his brother, Duncan, and paints a portrait of family life in Utah that’s cosier still. “My brother and I own a bar called Bar X in Salt Lake City, together with my brother in law and another brother in law…” He stops himself and laughs. “That’s very Big Love, isn’t it?” he says, referring to the HBO series about Utah-based polygamists.

He and his brother, Duncan, and his many brothers-in-law are also about to open a beer garden and a clothes shop. He balks at the suggestion that he’s a burgeoning entrepreneur. “No, I have the easy part. The real entrepreneurs are up there working hard while I’m sitting here. But I love being involved.” And then there’s also a writing project. He and Duncan have created a sitcom about growing up in rural Oregon, which ABC have reputedly already picked up. It’s loosely based on a period in their own family history when their father and his brother bought and ran a country store in the middle of nowhere. “In a perfect world, when the show is over, I’d go back to more films, but I’d also be writing with my brother.”

The BBC series Outnumbered recently ended because its child stars got too old and, essentially, stopped being cute. Does an end to Modern Family weigh heavily on Burrell? “Yes, it does. Basically in three years’ time, there will have to be a decision made about what to do because none of the kids will be in school anymore.” He doesn’t fear burn out himself because he loves the part so much, but burn out for the writers is another issue. “The writers have a very difficult job. They’re writing three episodes a week. I wouldn’t want to do the show past the point where the writers get burned out.”

It’s easy to see why losing Phil will be like losing a limb for Burrell. The character was, after all, responsible for transforming his life. After so many years of poverty – during college he lived out of a van to save money – what does he spend his money on now? “It dawned on me recently that the things we splurge on are not the kind of things you can hold,” he says. “Basically travel and food. We’ve gone to a couple of restaurants and had meals that neither Holly or I could have dreamt of. She’s a true foodie. Neither of us come from money; we’re both so accustomed to looking for the cheapest thing on the menu, it’s been remarkable to be able to take her to restaurants and not look at the price.”

Ever well-meaning, Burrell is apologetic when the interview has to come to a close. He’s got an evening with his children planned. As I watch the world’s most famous on-screen father depart for real-life dad duties, a quote from Phil Dunphy comes to mind: “I’ve always said that if my son thinks of me as one of his idiot friends, I’ve succeeded as a dad.” Burrell has succeded alright, but he’s no idiot.

Muppets Most Wanted is released on March 28

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