Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Sofia Vergara recall Ed O’Neill’s hilarious random phone calls

Jesse Tyler Ferguson hosted a mini Modern Family reunion on his Dinner’s On Me podcast this week when he welcomed Sofia Vergara. While the pair discussed the tears shed when Modern Family wrapped up its 11-year run, they also said they get plenty of Ed O’Neill in their lives, even if it’s by accident.

Discussing the end of the show, they acknowledged how difficult it was to wrap the show at the start of the pandemic. After the finale, Ferguson and Vergara didn’t see each other for two years. Though, they said, O’Neill was happy to skip town and move to Hawaii. “Although he sort of got bored, I think,” Ferguson added. “‘Cause, I don’t know about you, but he would call me randomly.”

Vergara quickly showed she knew what he was talking about. “Oh yeah, believe me, he would call me randomly,” she said.

And sometimes it would be by accident,” Ferguson said. “He’d FaceTime me, and I would just see, like, the side of his house. Like he would be holding his phone, accidentally like FaceTiming me, so I’d just be like seeing his wall.

He continued: “I’d be like Ed, Ed, Ed, it’s me. And he would be like, ‘Jesse, what are you doing on my phone?'”

Vergara added that she knows not only the accidental calls but also accidental messages from O’Neill. “You know what he does to me a lot? He leaves me messages, I think, because my name is Sofia and his daughter is Sophia. He leaves messages all the time, but it’s to the daughter,” Vergara said. “He always starts ‘Sophia, it’s dad.’ I’m like, at the beginning, it was like, ‘Why is he calling? Why is he calling himself that to me?’ You know? And then I was like, ‘Oh, it’s Sophia, the daughter.