KCK’s Eric Stonestreet on ‘Modern Family’ finale, COVID-19 | The Kansas City Star

Back in early January, when the world was a different place, Eric Stonestreet was looking forward to the Kansas City Chiefs’ playoff run and jumping into his new role as a part owner of the Kansas City Royals.

“Re-tethering myself to Kansas City” as he put it at an ABC press conference during the Television Critics Association press tour, a transition, he said, to follow the end of “Modern Family” after 11 successful seasons. The series finale airs Wednesday, April 8.

“This was a way to show that my pride and passion for Kansas City is real, and help out the organization in any way I can,” the Kansas City, Kansas, native said then. “We’re now working to figure out how I can help out with my presence, notoriety, whatever you want to call it, and just get the Royals discussed on a different platform than maybe in previous years.”

He was looking forward to “just being around the stadium and connecting with fans.”

But that was before COVID-19 shut down sports. And Hollywood.

Stonestreet has been riding out the pandemic at his home in Los Angeles, separated from family and his girlfriend, Lindsay Schweitzer, a Kansas City pediatric nurse.

“I’ve just been following the rules like everybody,” Stonestreet says during a follow-up phone interview in late March, a week after donating 200,000 meals to Kansas City’s Harvesters Community Food Network. “I was supposed to be back in Kansas City right now actually. … I’ll wait it out here and hopefully this will pass and I’ll be able to get home at some point soon.”

Farewell, ‘Modern Family’

In January, Stonestreet hadn’t yet started to process the ending of his 11-year job starring on “Modern Family” as Cam, husband of Mitch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). But by mid-February wistfulness crept into his Twitter feed, particularly just before a Paris-set episode, the last to feature Cam as his clown alter-ego, Fizbo. (In real life, Stonestreet created Fizbo when he was a kid in KCK, performing at birthday parties and the like.)

By Stonestreet’s final day on set Feb. 21, he was posting sentimental videos — including one where he’s wearing a Chiefs hat — and a photo of himself staring at the exit door on Stage 5 at the Fox lot in Century City, California, where “Modern Family” filmed.

“I think we all had pushed off the inevitable feeling of sadness,” he says. “The way the show set up the final scene is it was the last scene we shot of the show. When that moment happened, it hit us.”

Stonestreet says he took a few things from the set: A painting that hung near Mitch and Cam’s bedroom with black crows on it (“I always liked that painting and … I could imagine it being somewhere in my house”) and a wood carving that viewers would see in the background when the pair were interviewed in their living room while speaking directly to the camera (“the original house we shot the pilot in had something similar to that, and I always thought it was cool how the art department replicated it in a much smaller version in the house (on the soundstage).”

As to how the series ends, Stonestreet says viewers shouldn’t expect the finale to blow up the characters’ lives too much.

“We want to let the audience know that these characters are going to live on and be the same people in the future that they’ve gotten to know in the last 11 years,” Stonestreet says. “When I started improv training in Chicago, I had a teacher that taught us that the best way out of an improv scene is the beginning. And I most definitely think that the show will have that same approach.”

The ending is bittersweet, he says, because viewers may be sad to no longer see new adventures of the “Modern Family” characters every week, “but if you buy into the idea that their lives go on, it’s very satisfying imagining what’s going on with Jay in five years and Mitch and Cam in a couple of years. The writers did a good job of setting it up to allow the audience to fill in all those blanks.”

‘Cured of homophobia’

The show’s legacy as a smart family sitcom with a mockumentary-style format may be eclipsed only by its depiction of a loving, committed monogamous gay couple who adopted a daughter.

When the show began in 2009, same-sex marriage was banned in Missouri (by a 2004 state constitutional amendment) and Kansas (by a 2005 state constitutional amendment) both of which were ruled unconstitutional in 2014. The next year, same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, and perhaps “Modern Family,” as with “Will & Grace” before it, helped a little in changing hearts and minds.

Stonestreet says he heard that response from viewers hundreds of times. A stage manager on an Australian talk show passed Stonestreet a note saying his son came out as gay, and Mitch and Cam opened his eyes to loving his son more than he thought he could. A meme pictured Mitch and Cam emblazoned with the words, “These guys cured my dad of his homophobia.”

“For me personally, being from Kansas, my goal was to make Cam more relatable to the people I grew up with, people that I might not think would have an open heart and open mind to someone like him,” says Stonestreet, a graduate of Piper High School. “That guys that I went to college with (at Kansas State University) or grew up with or their friends would say, ‘Man, I’d love to have a beer with that guy. He’d be awesome to sit down and talk to.’ That’s where growth and change happens. It’s not forced down people’s throats; it’s having their minds and hearts opened up.”

Series co-creator Steve Levitan says when he and Christopher Lloyd developed “Modern Family,” they always took the show’s title to heart and wanted to depict how families have changed. They knew early on that the series would feature a gay couple adopting a baby.

“We knew several people like that,” Levitan says. “As soon as we landed on that and locked it in, I remember saying to Chris, ‘Well, there goes Middle America.’ And it’s a testament to Eric and Jesse that quite the contrary, people embraced these characters. … We got zero blowback. They were embraced because here was this couple that their first priority was their baby and raising it and doing it right. And people just said, ‘Well, it’s hard to argue with that.’”

Stonestreet recalls showing the pilot to “a group of friends in Kansas, where I’m from, (and afterwards) I sent an email to Chris and Steve and said, ‘Well, I can report from the breadbasket that we are going to be a hit,’ because I sat there and watched all of these middle‑aged people and people my parents’ age laugh at all of the right places.”

‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’

Right after this week’s “Modern Family” farewell telecast, Stonestreet appears in a 20^th anniversary revival of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Stonestreet will be playing for two Kansas City charities: Building Hope for Autism Foundation (his sister, Mauria Stonestreet, is the nonprofit’s executive director) and Nurse Navigators at the University of Kansas Cancer Center.

The other celebrity contestant that night will be comedian Will Forte, one of Stonestreet’s regular guests at the annual Big Slick Celebrity Weekend fundraiser for Children’s Mercy Hospital.

Stonestreet taped “Millionaire” without an audience just before all of Hollywood shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“It was exhilarating,” he says of being a “Millionaire” contestant. “My goal was just to not look like an idiot.”

He also shot two episodes as a judge on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” filling in for Heidi Klum when she took ill.

“Call Eric,” was the suggestion to the show’s producers from judge Sofia Vergara, Stonestreet’s “Modern Family” co-star.

The first episode he shot had an audience as usual, but for the second episode producers opted to go audience-free.

“One of the first groups that came out (on the second night) was a cheerleading group, and with no audience it was really weird for the contestants more so than for (judges) Simon (Cowell), Howie (Mandel) and Sofia,” Stonestreet says. There’s no word on when those episodes will air.

Prior to the country’s shutdown, Stonestreet hadn’t lined up any new projects. He says he’s taking his time, enjoying the success of the past 11 years and picking the next right thing. He doesn’t rule out revisiting Cam someday down the road, potentially in a spin-off series.

“Based on Twitter and Instagram, I think the fans would love to see a Mitch and Cam spin-off,” he says. “I think it’s something Jesse and I would both be game for if the timing was right. I don’t think we want to jump into something right at this moment. ... The notion of keeping the idea open is where we’re all at with it.”

Freelance writer Rob Owen: RobOwenTV@gmail.com or on Facebook and Twitter as RobOwenTV.

Wednesday, April 8, on ABC

▪ 7 p.m.: “A Modern Farewell,” documentary about the show’s 11 seasons.

▪ 8 p.m.: The one-hour “Modern Family” series finale.

▪ 9 p.m.: Eric Stonestreet competes for two Kansas City charities on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”