When I was a kid, 50 years old just seemed like… you're done,” says Jesse Tyler Ferguson. “Of course, now that I am 50, I don’t feel that way at all.”
The Modern Family star hit the half-century mark some 11 months ago, but you wouldn’t necessarily guess it. Really, he’s always had a slightly nebulous relationship with age. When he was first cast in the hit sitcom, back in 2009 – as the fussbudgety lawyer Mitchell Pritchett, doting husband and comic foil to Eric Stonestreet’s histrionic Cam and adoptive father of Vietnamese infant Lily – Ferguson thought he looked too young to play a parent. His solution was to carpet his youthful cheeks with facial hair. (It worked, more or less.) Now, older, wiser, and with just a little less red in his follicles, Ferguson seems like he’s belatedly living the life he spent years pretending to on screen. “I’m an older dad, with these two young kids at home,” he explains. “I don’t have the option to feel old.”
