Part of Modern Family featuring Ed O'Neill, Sofía Vergara, Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
Rise to Fame
His path to Hollywood started with a dare at Kansas State, where a friend bet him to audition for a campus play. He was studying to become a prison administrator. After a sociology degree in 1996, he trained in improv at The Second City and IO Chicago, then grinded through a decade of small TV parts, including a recurring gig on CSI as a questionable-documents tech named Ronnie Litre, before landing Cam Tucker on Modern Family in 2009. The character, a theatrical, big-hearted farm kid from Missouri, was one of the better comic inventions on network TV that decade. Two Emmys, in 2010 and 2012, confirmed it.
In the Spotlight
Modern Family ended in 2020, and Stonestreet did something unusual for an L.A. actor: he moved back to Kansas City. He joined the Dexter: Resurrection cast in 2025 but hasn't chased the next franchise. He pitched a Mitch and Cam spinoff that got rejected, which he has said 'felt a little hurtful.' A series called Home Team, in development at Amazon with Peyton Manning's production company, would be his next major project. He married Lindsay Schweitzer, a pediatric nurse, at their Kansas City home in September 2025.
Side Notes
He co-hosts Big Slick, the annual celebrity softball weekend in Kansas City, with Paul Rudd, Jason Sudeikis, and Rob Riggle. All four grew up in the Kansas City area. The event has raised over $24 million for pediatric cancer research at Children's Mercy Hospital. He met his wife, pediatric nurse Lindsay Schweitzer, at a Big Slick charity auction in 2017, and he has said her twin sons had a hand in his 2021 marriage proposal.