Why ‘Modern Family’ star Ty Burrell left Hollywood for Utah

Ty Burrell is enjoying his post-Dunphy life, far away from the glitz and glamor of Hollywood.

The Modern Family star, who spent 11 seasons as lovable man-child Phil Dunphy, has revealed that when the long-running ABC sitcom wrapped in 2020, he moved his family from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City.

“It’s just been spectacular,” the actor, 57, told PEOPLE of his big move. “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.”

That said, the Muppets Most Wanted actor admitted that Salt Lake City was an adjustment for him, wife Holly, and their daughters, Frances, 15 and Greta, 13. Burrell said he wasn’t a lover of the outdoors when they chose the mountainous region.

“My parents weren’t really those kinds of people,” he explained. “So at first, when we moved here, it almost felt like cosplay, like we were pretending to be people who were outdoorsy.”

He added, “And now we really truly love it.”

Though it wasn’t until after Modern Family concluded that Burrell set down roots in Salt Lake City, he previously voiced affection for the Utah capital in a 2014 HuffPost essay, in which he recounted falling for the city while doing a play there in 1999. It also played a major role in his love life, as he took the job to be closer to his then-girlfriend whom he would later marry.

“Over the next 10 years my wife and I travelled back and forth to spend time with family and began to fall deeper in love with your incredibly affordable lifestyle and immediate access to the outdoors,” he wrote. “We fell so deeply that we didn’t feel like we could be apart anymore and we moved from New York in 2008.”

While Burrell’s connection to SLC is his own, the two-time Emmy winner is certainly not the only Modern Family alum who stepped away from Hollywood after a long tenure on the beloved family sitcom.

His onscreen daughter, Ariel Winter, also departed Los Angeles for a quieter life. The L.A.-born actress, who began her career at 4 and landed a role on the comedy at 11, recently opened up about her choice to depart the city where she endured severe emotional trauma. 

“The experiences I had in person and online as a child have affected me so deeply that I’ve had to go to therapy for it,” she told PEOPLE in May. “The movie and TV industry is a dark place.”

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Winter, who now lives in Nashville with her boyfriend and fellow actor Luke Benward, continued, “I didn’t leave the industry, I just left the city of L.A. 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.”