Ariel Winter, the Modern Family star who chose to be heard, not seen

Ariel Winter

Photo: Rogue Artists / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 28, 1998 Fairfax, Virginia
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Ice Age: The Meltdown, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2
Awards	SAG Award (shared)

Ariel Winter spent eleven seasons being watched by millions of people every week, and her adult career reads like a long, deliberate effort to need that attention less. The voice of Sabrina, the suspicious older sister in Apple TV’s animated The Sisters Grimm, is hers, and so is Disney‘s Princess Sofia, a character she says she never really left. The work she describes with the most conviction carries no screen credit at all. For a nonprofit called Safe from Online Sex Abuse, she sits at a laptop pretending to be a twelve-year-old girl, so that the grown men who answer can be met by police.

The camera arrived before she could read. Ariel Winter Workman grew up in a family that treated acting as the household trade: her older siblings, Shanelle and Jimmy Workman, were already working actors, and she booked her first job, a Cool Whip commercial, at four. The girl from Fairfax, Virginia, was soon collecting guest spots on Monk, Bones and ER. At seven she had a small part in Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and her voice was already turning up in studio animation, from Ice Age: The Meltdown to Horton Hears a Who!.

Then came the part that fixed her in the public mind. ABC cast her as Alex Dunphy, the sharp, sardonic middle child of Julie Bowen’s Claire and Ty Burrell’s Phil in Modern Family, which premiered in 2009 and ran for eleven seasons until 2020. Winter, born on January 28, 1998, played Alex from 11 to 22. The cast shared four consecutive Screen Actors Guild awards for outstanding comedy ensemble, and Alex, the overachiever who treats her own family as an obstacle course, became the template for a certain kind of television teenager: brilliant, impatient, slightly lonely.

Alongside the sitcom ran a second career most viewers never connected to her face. She voiced Gretchen in Phineas and Ferb and, from the 2012 pilot onward, the title role in Disney Junior’s Sofia the First, a peasant girl turned princess who carried the series through 2018 and some of the highest ratings in preschool cable. She gave Frank Miller’s teenage Robin, Carrie Kelley, her voice in the two-part Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, played Penny Peterson in DreamWorks’ Mr. Peabody & Sherman and turned up in ParaNorman and Smurfs: The Lost Village. Her strangest live-action choice of those years went the opposite direction from Disney: in Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision, which played Sundance’s midnight section in 2012, she was Grace, the sick younger sister of AnnaLynne McCord’s disturbed lead. Her lead role in The Chaperone earned her a Young Artist Award nomination.

Off screen, those were hard years, and they were conducted in public. In 2012 her sister Shanelle petitioned for guardianship, alleging that their mother had been physically and emotionally abusive; in 2014 a court permanently placed Winter in Shanelle’s care, and their mother later said the family had moved beyond the conflict. At 17 Winter announced she was legally emancipated. The same year she had breast reduction surgery, which she later described as relief from pain that had sometimes left her unable to stand up straight. When she wore a gown that showed the scars at the 2016 Screen Actors Guild Awards, the next day’s coverage, as she put it, was about “my cleavage” and “not about my talent.” She graduated from Campbell Hall School that June, enrolled at UCLA the following year and paused her studies indefinitely in 2018.

The awkward fact of her post-sitcom career is that the fame Modern Family built has not turned into a screen career of matching size. Her live-action work since the finale has been small and mostly unloved: Barry Jay’s thriller Like Father Like Son, which she also executive-produced, drew harsh reviews on release in 2025, and Don’t Log Off, a lockdown screenlife horror film she produced with her then-partner Luke Benward, was shot in 2020 and reached a handful of theaters and on-demand platforms five years later. She talks about voice acting as freedom, work that can be done from anywhere and that lets her step away from being recognised, and that is true. It is also a retreat from the medium that made her, and the pattern so far looks more like a refusal of the old terms than an alternative path. The decoy work raises its own question: the stings reach the public as episodes of SOSA Undercover, filmed and cut for YouTube, and the format never fully settles where child protection ends and true-crime entertainment begins.

Winter’s own account of why she does it is direct. She found SOSA after watching Undercover Underage, the docuseries about the group, and has said that the inappropriate messages from older men began when she was a young actor, in person and online. Since 2025 she has been one of its decoys on stings built with Internet Crimes Against Children task forces. “It can be scary at times pretending to be 12 and talking to older men, but it’s validating to put away predators that have been harming children,” she said in Predator Files, the Crime+Investigation series in which she tells that story herself.

The rest of 2026 has been the busiest stretch she has had in years. Sofia the First: Royal Magic, the sequel series, premiered on Disney Jr. on May 25, eight years after she last voiced the character. “For me personally, it really feels like I never left Sofia,” she told Yahoo Entertainment. On September 3 Nickelodeon and Paramount+ premiered Clash of the Thundermans, the film extension of The Thundermans, with Winter as Cognita, a powerful and mysterious newcomer, opposite returning stars Kira Kosarin and Jack Griffo. And on October 2 Apple TV releases the six-episode second season of The Sisters Grimm, the Titmouse-animated adaptation of Michael Buckley’s novels, with Winter back as Sabrina a year after the first season premiered.

In 2022 she moved from Southern California to Nashville, is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and holds a purple belt in taekwondo. Her relationship with Benward ended in August 2025.

She has not closed the door on the show that made her. Asked this year about a Modern Family revival, she said she would “never be opposed to replaying a character I thought was wonderful,” and imagined Alex in a demanding, powerful job, with more of a life outside it. For now the character she is playing is Sabrina Grimm, whose second season starts streaming on Apple TV this week, and the question that matters for her next decade is whether a live-action role arrives that is worth being looked at again.

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