Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet has admitted he was “hurt” by US broadcaster ABC’s decision to throw the brakes on a planned spin-off project.
Eric played Cameron Tucker in all 11 seasons of the hit sitcom, for which he won two Emmys.
After it came to an end in 2020, there’ve been plenty of rumours that a Modern Family spin-off about Eric’s character and his on-screen husband relocating to Missouri with their family could be on the cards.
However, in a recent interview with Graham Bensinger, Eric admitted he thinks these plans have now been axed.
“They had their chance,” he explained. “[Modern Family creator] 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’.”
Eric continued: “I love my character. I love the show. I love Jesse. We had a great working relationship, we had amazing chemistry.
“I think Jesse and I maybe felt like they thought of us as the old guys, or something like that, that didn’t seem worthy of keeping those characters going.”
He admitted: “It felt a little hurtful. But people make business decisions.”
Eric went on to say he thinks the show “would have been a slam dunk” because so many of Modern Family’s original creatives were on board.
“It would have been great. If ABC would have said ‘Let’s do it,’ I think we’d be on right now,” he claimed.
While Eric is now hoping for a one-off return to Modern Family in a Christmas special, he and a handful of his co-stars recently came together for an ad campaign set in the Modern Family universe, which aired during the Super Bowl earlier this year.