Ariel Winter Calls This Modern Family Costar Her ‘Best Friend’: We’re ‘Extremely Close’ (Exclusive)

It’s been five years since actress Ariel Winter, 27, wrapped up her 11-season run as Alex Dunphy on the hit series Modern Family — and despite the show’s wild popularity, she says when she was first cast, she had no idea it would become such a big deal.

“I was 11 when it started. I don’t think I had any idea of if it was going to be successful or not,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “I was just like, ‘Oh, awesome, I got a job.'” She laughs and says, “What I was so excited for was to get the chance to work with Al Bundy [Ed O’Neill, who played her grandfather, Jay Pritchett.]

“But once the show started, it was an immediate hit, and it was so exciting to have that opportunity. And being on the same show for so long? I feel like that doesn’t really happen anymore,” she says.

While Winter became close with all of her castmates, she says she has a deep, deep friendship with Nolan Gould, who played her little brother Luke Dunphy.

“I’m extremely close to Nolan,” Winter says. “He plays my little brother, and he and I are still best friends.”

She says that they all became so close that when the show finally wrapped, it was difficult to say goodbye.

“It was hard,” she says about the show ending. “We were like a real family. It was weird knowing it would just be over, and I wouldn’t get to see everybody all the time anymore. It was like, wait, yeah, wait, we’re not going to be together on Monday? So on the one hand, I didn’t want it to end, but at the same time, I was ready to start something new as an adult.”

If the show ending was tough, growing up in front of millions wasn’t always easy.

Winter faced endless scrutiny as her body changed naturally and had to deal with comments online and even to her face, it seemed audiences just didn’t like their studious little Alex Dunphy becoming a woman with curves. The trolling often focused on her weight.

“That was a major part of my teenage years,” she says of the constant body scrutiny. “It was just everywhere. 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 says. “It totally damaged my self-esteem.”

She continues, “I was just a growing, changing person. It was really, really hard to be torn down constantly.” At the time, she’d often try to defend herself on social media: In 2017 she wrote on X (then Twitter), “I’m not a whore because I wear shorts and tank tops. I’m a normal girl. Also, I’m not ‘squeezing’ into anything. My shorts fit.”

Looking back now, Winter says speaking out was always going to be a lose-lose situation.

“I understood what it was like to be hated. It’s like people look for one person, especially on a big ensemble show, to tear down.” Because she was going through an ugly battle with her mother, Chrisoula Workman, whom she accused of abuse and emancipated from at age 17, she says the public decided it should be her. (Workman denied the allegations.)

“I think I was the easy one because I was already going through so much and so publicly that they just were like, we pick her,” Winter says of the media scrutiny. “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.’”

But Winter has plenty to be happy and grateful for — and Modern Family was certainly one of them. Now she’s looking forward to her future career, which includes a podcast and a cooking show, and a return to her role on Sofia the First next year.