Ariel was only 11 years old when Modern Family first aired in 2009, and now, at 27 years old, she’s looking back on difficult moments in her career, why she chose to leave Los Angeles, and how she’s healing from her traumatic childhood through service.
In an interview with People, Ariel revealed that while she had a successful career starring as Alex Dunphy in the hit ABC sitcom, she faced scrutiny online about her body and appearance across the show’s 11 seasons.
“It was just everywhere,” Ariel told the publication for their May 19 cover story.
“It was every headline I read about myself, like, grown people writing articles about me saying how I looked terrible or pregnant or like a fat slut. I mean, I was 14,” she remembered. “It totally damaged my self-esteem.”
Ariel claimed her experience made her understand “what it was like to be hated” by random people. “No matter what I was going through, I was a target. It made it very difficult to look at myself in the mirror and go, ‘I love this version of me.'”
Being in the Hollywood spotlight in this way was justifiably difficult, so when Modern Family ended in 2020, Ariel and her boyfriend, Luke Benward, moved from Los Angeles for a change of scenery, but that didn’t mean she quit Hollywood.
“I didn’t leave the industry,” Ariel said. “I just left the city of L.A. It holds some not-great memories for me, and I’m young and never lived anywhere else, and thought, ‘Why not?’ If you’re no longer on a network show that shoots there, you don’t really have to be there, and if I get a network show, I can easily go back.”
While she continues to pursue acting, Ariel has also started work with SOSA (Safe from Online Sex Abuse), a nonprofit that combats online child sex abuse and trafficking through undercover operations with law enforcement, advocacy, and education, according to their website.
You can check the rest of the full interview here.