In new interview, Eric Stonestreet talks KC wedding plans, ‘Modern Family’ Xmas special
Eric Stonestreet — K-State alum, mega-fan of Kansas City sports teams — has lived in the Kansas City area since his hit ABC series, “Modern Family,” ended after 11 seasons in 2020.
He recently reunited with some of his cast mates to film a WhatsApp commercial.
And while it was “great to be back with everybody,” going back to Los Angeles showed him what he doesn’t really miss about the place.
In a new interview with sports/entertainment reporter Graham Bensinger, he reveals his idea for a “Modern Family” Christmas special and shows the house he and his fiancee, Lindsay Schweitzer, are building in the Kansas City area.
(Fun detail: Some of the bricks in the new home came from old streets in Manhattan, Kansas, home of Stonestreet’s beloved alma mater.)
“It was fun. It was great to be back with everybody. It was very exciting. It’s weird to get back in those clothes — just jump right back in,” Stonestreet tells Bensinger about filming the recent commercial.
“But what I realized it does is it highlights everything great about our business, the entertainment business. And it highlights all the douchebaggery of our business. It amplifies it.
“Because I’m here (in KC), I’m dealing with people from here, and I’m going into the store and having all these authentic, real moments, and then I go to Hollywood, and you’re reminded of some of the types of people that you deal with. But then you’re also offered fruit on a big board. ‘Would you like some lychee and kiwi, sir?’
“It’s like, oh, yeah, this is what’s great about Hollywood… So, it’s really fun. It just amplifies it. It’s like, leaving (Kansas City) and going back and doing something is almost more fun than it was living there, doing it.”
“In Depth with Graham Bensinger” airs Sunday nights on KSHB-TV. Stonestreet’s interview debuts Sunday night following the Chiefs-Falcons game and two post-game shows, around midnight.
Stonestreet speaks emotionally about the death of his father, Vincent Stonestreet, three years ago at the family’s home in KCK.
Stonestreet’s father died at age 80 in November 2021, four years after being diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer whose symptoms many people don’t recognize until its later stages.
“He got to the point where he had to go for a weekly transfusion to stay alive. And I kept begging him to do that, because, selfishly, I didn’t want him to die, right?” Stonestreet said.
“But I also had very quiet moments with him … saying, ‘At some point, I know, Dad, it’s, it’s not gonna be about me and mom and your family and my sister and everybody, that it is about you. And when it’s that time, I got your back. I will be honest with you and I won’t fight you. I won’t try to talk you into doing anything that you don’t wanna do.’ “
He said his father was “always was curious about what death would be like for his type of cancer.” His doctor told him that once he stopped getting transfusions his body, in about a month, would “just go to sleep,” Stonestreet said.
His father let him know he was ready to die when he said: “Eric, I don’t have any more fuel in the tank.”
His dad loved the sound of big booms and owned a little cannon that shot a 10-gauge blank when its string was pulled. He liked to fire it up for visitors to the family home.
When the funeral home arrived to take his father’s body away, Stonestreet got that little cannon out and fired it as his dad was driven away.
“I just wanted to make him proud and just thought he was such a good guy,” Stonestreet said. “When he passed away — and I saw him take his last breath — that’s all I could keep saying in that moment, was, ‘You’re such a good guy.’”
A modern family wedding?
Stonestreet and Schweitzer talk about how they met at her work place — she was working as a nurse at Children’s Mercy, the beneficiary of the Big Slick fundraiser — and their wedding plans.
The two got engaged in August 2021. They have not publicly announced a wedding date, and it doesn’t sound like they have one.
They’re building a house on 78 acres in the area where they say they might host their wedding reception. The property features an 1865 one-room schoolhouse that was torn down from its original location in Scottown, Ohio and reassembled on their property to serve as their new TV room.
The cabin inspired the entire project, Stonestreet said.
“So, there’s a show called ‘Barnwood Builders’ — been a fan of forever — and always dreamed of having a log cabin,” he said. “But I always thought I would get a smokehouse, a pioneer smokehouse.
“But then once we started here, I told Lindsay, I’m like, ‘I’d like to get a log cabin and then build the house around it.’ And she’s like, ‘Hmm. I’m sorry. Come again?’”
They’re building the home with entertainment in mind, a place showy enough to lure Stonestreet’s glamorous “Modern Family” co-star, Sofia Vergara, to Kansas City, Stonestreet joked.
Bensinger asked about a possible “Modern Family” spin-off.
“I don’t think it’s potential anymore,” Stonestreet said. “Well, they had their chance. Chris Lloyd and a couple of the writers wrote a really great script that spun Jesse (Tyler Ferguson) and I off in our life in Missouri, and they said, ‘No.’ They just said, ‘We don’t want to do it.’
“And I think it hurt Jesse and I’s feelings. I think it hurt Chris Lloyd’s feelings.”
He said he loved his Emmy-winning role of Cameron Tucker, a native of fictional Grasshopper, Missouri, who is married on the show to Tyler Ferguson’s Mitchell Pritchett.
“I love the show. I love Jesse. We had a great working relationship,” he said. “Like, I would have kept going. I think everyone would have kept going a year away from being done with the show. Like you, you give everybody a year’s time to be like, ‘Do you wanna go back?’ Everybody says yes.
“And maybe even ABC at the time would have been like, ‘Yeah, come back, come back, come back.’ Because the world shut down (during the pandemic) and everything was different… I think Jesse and I maybe felt like they thought of us as the old, old, old guys, or something like that, that didn’t seem worthy of keeping those characters going.
“It just felt a little hurtful. But people make business decisions. I mean, we can’t get involved in that.”
He said he wished the show “would do a Christmas special or something like that. And there’s been talk of that. Like a couple writers have had that idea of, like, doing sort of like British-sort of versions of Christmas specials. Like a two-hour movie every once in a while. That’d be fun.”
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