Ty Burrell

Tyler Gerald Burrell was born on August 22, 1967, in Grants Pass, Oregon, the son of Sheri Rose Burrell, a teacher, and Gary Gerald Burrell, a family therapist who died in 1989. He grew up in Applegate, Oregon, near the California border, and attended Hidden Valley High School in Grants Pass, where he played football as a lineman for the Hidden Valley Mustangs. He is primarily of English and German descent, though research conducted for the television program Finding Your Roots revealed that he also has 1/16th African-American ancestry through a great-great-grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman from Tennessee who later became a homesteader in Oregon. He has a younger brother, Duncan.

Burrell pursued his undergraduate education at the University of Oregon, where he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity and worked as a bartender at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, before transferring to Southern Oregon University in Ashland. He earned a bachelor's degree in theatre arts from Southern Oregon University in 1993 and returned to the school in 2008 as its commencement speaker. He subsequently enrolled at Penn State University, where he earned an MFA and was a member of the Theatre 100 Company alongside Keegan-Michael Key. During his graduate school years, he lived out of his van for a period to save money. In 1997 and 1999, he worked as a festival actor at the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

Burrell made his Broadway debut in 2000, playing Lennox in the revival of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. His stage work also includes several off-Broadway productions, among them Corners, The Blue Demon, Burn This, and Show People. He co-wrote and performed in the original production of the offbeat comedy The Red Herring O' Happiness, directed by Russell Dyball, and collaborated with his brother Duncan on the off-Broadway play Babble. In 2006, he appeared in the world premiere of Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at the Royal Court Theatre in London, playing one of the two leads.

His first credited film appearances came in 2001 with Evolution and Black Hawk Down. He subsequently appeared in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and played Leonard Samson in the 2008 Marvel film The Incredible Hulk. His film credits also include National Treasure: Book of Secrets, in which he played a White House curator, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Friends with Money, The Darwin Awards, Muppets Most Wanted, and the animated features Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Finding Dory, and Storks. On television, he played plastic surgeon Oliver Barnes on the CBS sitcom Out of Practice from 2005 to 2006 and co-starred alongside Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton in the Fox sitcom Back to You from 2007 to 2008, a series created by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd. He also appeared as a New Jersey prosecutor in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

Burrell is best known for his role as realtor Phil Dunphy on the ABC sitcom Modern Family, which ran from 2009 to 2020 and was created by Christopher Lloyd and Steve Levitan. He received eight consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series between 2010 and 2017, winning the award in 2011 and 2014. He also received multiple Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for his individual performance, winning the award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series in 2014, and shared five Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series with his castmates. In addition to his acting work on the show, he appeared in commercials for the National Association of Realtors in character as Phil Dunphy. In 2016, he debuted the web series Boondoggle on ABC.com, loosely based on his own life, and received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Actor in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series in 2017. In November 2014, he signed an overall deal with 20th Century Fox Television to develop comedy projects, and in July 2020 he established his own production company, Desert Whale Productions.

Outside of performing, Burrell owns The Eating Establishment, a restaurant in Park City, Utah, as well as two adjacent bars in Salt Lake City, Bar X and Beer Bar. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of Salt Lake City's bars and restaurants in March 2020, Burrell and his wife contributed $100,000 of their own money to launch Tip Your Server, a crowd-sourced fund to support out-of-work wait staff in Utah. Burrell married Holly Burrell on August 18, 2000. The couple lived in New York City before relocating to Salt Lake City in 2008 and later to Southern California during his years on Modern Family, before returning to Salt Lake City after the show concluded in 2020. They adopted two daughters, the first in March 2010 and the second two years later. They retain a two-bedroom apartment in the Astoria neighborhood of New York, which they rent out. Burrell has identified himself as a lifelong fan of the Oregon Ducks, the Portland Trail Blazers, the New York Mets, and the Los Angeles Rams.