Ty Burrell

Ty Burrell got into acting by watching second acts during slow bar shifts at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, then earned a theater degree and ground through bit parts in New York and Hollywood for years. By 2009, he was close to quitting. Modern Family gave him Phil Dunphy, the relentlessly optimistic dad who genuinely believes he's cool. Eight Emmy nominations followed. He won twice. The character looks easy; the competition proved it wasn't.

Modern Family ended in 2020 after 11 seasons, and Burrell has been quiet since. Two Emmy wins make him easy to underestimate: he plays broad and likable, which makes the craft invisible. He co-owns two bars in Salt Lake City and a restaurant in Park City. Turns out the guy who studied acting from behind a bar eventually went back to it.

He's the kind of person who shows up at Oregon Ducks football games whenever he can, and Southern Oregon University students built a shrine to him in 2017, so the devotion runs both ways. Finding Your Roots revealed he has 1/16th African-American ancestry through a great-great-grandmother who reportedly had been enslaved in Tennessee before homesteading in Oregon, which rewrote the family history for the actor whose entire identity runs through one state.