Tony winner Jesse Tyler Ferguson talks Broadway, baseball and LGBTQ rights
UpdateJesse Tyler Ferguson just won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play, but his relationship with sports is complicated.“I was an indoor kid growing up,” he recently told Queerty, just days after the opening of his return to Broadway in the critically acclaimed revival of Take Me Out. “I did not love sports.
I hated gym class. My parents put me on a soccer team, and nobody explained the rules to me. For our first game, I tripped on a sprinkler and the team ran over me.”After high school, Ferguson traded cleats for jazz shoes, heading to New York City to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of his Broadway debut in the Public Theater’s revival of On the Town (opposite Lea DeLaria, also returning to Broadway this season in POTUS).
Ferguson plays Mason Marzac, the business manager of a major league baseball player, whose coming disrupts the perception of America’s favorite pastime.Related: Balls, bats and brawn: Broadway’s ‘Take Me Out’ hits a home runKnown to television audiences for 11 seasons as the lovingly neurotic Mitchell Pritchett on the ABC comedy Modern Family, Ferguson said that the “theater has always been my first love” and was eager to return to Second Stage Theater for his third production.
