ABC announced on Feb. 5 that Modern Family would be ending after season 11. The show debuted in 2009 and became an instant hit. Over the years, the show has won multiple Emmys and Golden Globes. The cast has become family to us, and seeing their hilarious shenanigans has been an absolute delight for fans everywhere. HollywoodLife talked with Nolan Gould, a.k.a. Luke Dunphy, at the Television Critics Association winter press tour about the show coming to an end. He said that he’s feeling “a lot of emotions. I haven’t quite taken the time yet to fully comprehend and work it out. Obviously, it’s a bittersweet moment, of course, and really sweet because we weren’t necessarily expecting another year. We thought season 10 was going to be our last. So I’m really excited to be doing another season and feel really blessed, but at the same time this is the first time that we’ve known that it is our final season.”
The creators haven’t told Nolan just yet how Luke will end up by the series finale. The show still has a number of episodes of season 10. “There are storylines that need to be wrapped up. We need to kind of figure out where the family’s going to go in the future to give people an idea,” Nolan continued. “I just want to let everyone know — don’t worry, Luke’s still gonna be in the house for the next 10 years. If there ever is a Modern Family reboot, it will just cut back to Luke still in the house, still doing his thing.”
Nolan does have his own set of hopes for Luke. He started the show when he was just 10 years old. He’s now 20 and will turn 21 during the final season. He’s grown up on the show, so the character of Luke has become a part of him. “I feel so close to him, so I want him to do well. I would like them to wrap up Luke’s storyline in a way where he’s able to make something of himself, or do something unexpected because Luke is an interesting character. He’s dumb, but he’s got this intelligence in a kind of out-of-the-box way, and I would really like to see them kind of find a good way to put that to use. He’s either going to become a crazy inventor or he’s going to become a con artist, either of which I’d like to see. Both would be fine,” Nolan said.
The young actor also noted that he would love to see Phil and Luke’s father-son relationship to echo what it was like in earlier seasons. “There was something that was so genuine and awesome about the first couple seasons of Modern Family where Phil and Luke’s relationship was very buddy-buddy. They were like just the same person. Anything that would happen to Phil would just bounce right back off of Luke. I think when Luke kind of hit puberty, they kind of had him go out on his own route, become an angsty teenage boy who didn’t want to hang out with dad, because a lot of families relate to that as well. But I would like to see, as Luke gets older, to return to that. Not that we don’t have those episodes, we do, but I’d like to see more of that.” Modern Family airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on ABC.