Ty Burrell
People discuss parenting the way they talk about denominations of faith.Collection: Parenting
I'm prone to hyperbole.
My wife handles all of our technology. So if something goes wrong with the computer, I throw up my arms and step aside while the IT gal figures it out.
I'm not taciturn and stoic.
Everything I do from now on, I'll have a mustache. I can promise you that. I don't care who I have to convince. If you see me with a mustache in a movie or on stage in the future, you'll know that I pitched the idea.
My favourite game is wiffle ball, a fake version of baseball with a plastic ball and bat that's really for kids.
Our house was a place where you were welcome to make an idiot out of yourself. Silliness was valued. My dad worked with foster kids in the foster care system, and I think silliness was a way for him to leaven things up.
I think once I fail enough as a dad, I'll be looking for help wherever I can get it. I just need enough time to screw things up and then I'll start looking to TV dads for advice.
A lot of modern comedies are difficult to watch too, because they're so ironic and so detached and so quote-unquote clever. They kind of keep you at arm's length. They can be really funny, but they're not really nourishing.
My younger brother and I have been writing together, mainly for fun, for years, but we've been improvising together since we were kids. Literally.
I'm not saying this just to be self-deprecating, but I have always taken delight in playing people who are oblivious, because I do think I have giant, giant blind spots. It's a very comfortable place to be.
I just like comedy in general. My film work, which has been at times more dramatic, has been satisfying. But I never feel quite as good and as light and blissful as when I'm doing comedy.
I've played a lot of really smarmy people in film, and it can be real fun, don't get me wrong. But it can be characters I'm not as excited to explore.
There's lots of problem solving in any marriage, but when you have this collective goal that is a human being, it's an inspiring rally point.
I didn't know that there was such a thing as butter carving. But then, I poked around a little bit. A quick Google search will show you 55,000 images of butter carvings, and they're extraordinary.
You know, I used to think I was a foodie, and then my wife went to culinary school and basically explained to me that I was just a guy that likes to eat.
And I watch 'Saturday Night Live' religiously, I have since I was a little boy. I watch it basically like one of my favorite sports teams.
I spent most of my formative years in rural Oregon.
After my father passed away in 1989, I fell pretty hard for theater as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. Before he died, he planted the seed that maybe I should look into performing.
I'm an obsessive sports fan, which my wife is incredibly patient about.
I'm not very romantic. My idea of romance is more practical - like washing the car.
My wife has taught me about unconditional love. When there's a conflict, there's never a thought that we won't work it out.
Once you do a show like 'Modern Family,' which has been an amazing thing, and I'm so happy about it, it does make it a little challenging to do other things.
I was a bouncer for, like, three months in Boston until everybody figured out that I should never be a bouncer. I'm so soft. I just have no aggression in me.
It's kind of a crazy thing with kid actors because a lot of them get hired without people really knowing if they're good or not. They get hired for the way they look at a really young age. You also have your fingers crossed around kid actors... because the lessons they learn on set aren't always the best. You can really get whatever you want.
Comedy can be fun no matter what you're playing. It always has the potential to be a blast.
There's nobody in my family that's in performance or in the business in any way, so it was not something that was encouraged as a profession. It was more just encouraged as a personality trait.
My dad was a fiercely funny guy, and he and his brother would get on runs. So my younger brother and I were basically mimicking them when we started goofing off.
I can't grow a beard.
I'm not handy.
There's no private side to acting, which some people find hard. I've drawn inspiration from athletes. They manage to be themselves under the pressure of public scrutiny, and they have it much harder - they have to perform with people yelling at them.
I'm glad I had to wait until my 40s for success. I was not a mature young man and would probably have gone off the rails.
The world can make an actor feel overly important. What I do isn't hard work. It's not ditch digging - which I have done, for one summer. Of course there are times when your fuel tank's low, but even on the hardest days, you are on a film set. You are doing something creative.
When you get on a comedy show, people assume you're a comedian. I'd say I'm more of a comedy nerd.
I don't know why, but it seems to be a common story for actors and comedians to have a tendency to be bad students and have difficulty focusing on things.
I grew up on 'Monty Python.'
I am very lucky that I came from a stable home, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life until acting sorted of landed in my lap when I was in my 20s. Acting, to me, was a bit like the ladder I used to climb out of feeling lost.
If you're trying to make something funny, and it doesn't feel like you're always getting something, it doesn't have quite a lot of joy.Collection: Joy
I had no real direction at all in my 20's and so I did what a lot of people without direction do: I took an acting class. In one of those first days of the class, I did this weird, silly improv, and it got laughs. It was such a blissful moment. I've never gotten over that love of hearing laughter. As a people pleaser, it's the drug of choice for me.Collection: Laughter
And I watch Saturday Night Live religiously, I have since I was a little boy. I watch it basically like one of my favorite sports teams.Collection: Sports
Comedy can be fun no matter what you're playing small or big comedy part. It always has the potential to be a blast.Collection: Fun
The truth is I've just never had any kind of plan at all for my career, which is probably not a very flattering thing to admit. I don't know that I'd ever planned to be in this situation. I'm still just an idiot, really really stupid. It's not like I'm now a genius because this has happened. I just got hugely lucky.Collection: Stupid
I don't believe, in a show like ours, that you really want to see character growth. That's just my opinion. Maybe to a small degree, but nothing serious. To that end, it doesn't have the same importance that it would have, if you were on an hour-long show. I think an audience gets really hungry for a character to grow and change on an hour-long show, and I think I would be more antsy.Collection: Believe
I've done animated TV stuff, but I'd never done animated film work, which is much more involved and much more labor intensive. The animators are much more meticulous and detailed. It's just been really fun and really satisfyingly creative.Collection: Fun
I got a little bit of a sense for the subculture, which is the equivalent of any subculture, really. The stakes are high, even if you live in a small town. It's like the annual bass fishing contests, or whatever it is. The stakes are always absurdly high, and this is no different. The competition at this butter carving things, from what I understand, is not that far off from what we're depicting in the movie.Collection: Fishing
When you don't have crazy ambitions, you're always happy just kind of getting by. Our expectations were always kept low. And so I feel like we appreciate it all the more to have all this good fortune come our way, which we hadn't really been planning.Collection: Crazy
I think there are pluses and minuses to being simpleminded. The minus is not having any sort of vision for the future. But on the plus side, my wife and I have really been happy through all of the ups and downs.Collection: Thinking
My father passed away before he saw me perform. I can't help but wonder what he would think of all this. I go to a job in full makeup.Collection: Jobs
Working with an incredibly strong script is the thing that gives you the most confidence. If you go into an episode knowing the script is strong, I just feel like that's where it all starts. All collaborations that happen, in addition to that, are just bonuses, at that point.Collection: Strong
I'm not a technical person, at all, but you get a little bit more of a sense for how to get something done a little bit more efficiently. I think everybody is in that place where it's a little bit more efficient, but the process is still the same, which is still loose and collaborative.Collection: Thinking