Meet Modern Family star Julie Bowen’s three children

Julie’s oldest child with her ex-husband Scott Phillips was born on 10 April 2007. The actress told People in 2008 that his name, Oliver McLanahan Phillips, comes from a family moniker. “Tolliver is a family name, but it is spelled ‘Taliafero’”, she explained. “I just couldn’t saddle the poor kid with a name he would have to explain and re-pronounce for his whole life. Oliver seemed like a natural evolution from Tolliver.”

The 18-year-old regularly shares photos via his Instagram account and has been a fixture at premieres, like the screening for Disney’s Tangled Before Ever After. While Julie has mostly kept her private life exactly that, she shared a bit of insight into her life with her own modern family in 2012, sharing that Oliver had accidentally broken his mother’s first Emmy. 

Julie’s son John makes up one half of her and Scott’s fraternal twins, who were born 7 May 2009. John and brother Gustav make a very early appearance in Modern Family as Julie was nearing the end of her pregnancy with the twins while filming the pilot. 

She told People in 2023 that she sat the boys down to watch their small cameo. “I said to my twins, ‘You’re in my stomach right there. You’re in this episode.’ Because I was pregnant with them on the pilot. They thought that was pretty funny and they watched some of it. But in front of me, they will not watch it.”

The other half of Julie’s 16-year-old twins, Gustav appears to enjoy joining his brother John in classic family life chaos. In 2018, Julie recounted to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show that while John is regularly practising headstands around the house, “his genius twin brother throws things at him, and he catches them between his legs”.

With all of her boys now in their teens, the actress says she feels like she’s in the “desert”. Julie explained to TODAY in 2024: “It’s like I got dumped by three guys I was madly in love with. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m right in the kitchen,’ and they never show up. It’s as desperate as I ever felt in high school when you had a crush on a boy.”

The Modern Family star shares her three children with real estate investor Scott. The couple tied the knot in 2004, five years before she got the role of Claire Dunphy. Her then-husband was a regular on the red carpet alongside his wife but made an exception for the 2016 Emmys. The actress explained: “We just had our anniversary on the day of the Emmys, which was hilarious. He’s come every year, he’s been so supportive and this year he was playing in a tennis tournament and I wasn’t nominated as an individual, so I said, ‘What do you want to do on our anniversary?’ I mean it’s such an honour to be nominated and to go, but it’s tough to be a purse holder.”

The couple separated in February 2018 and Julie had filed for divorce a few days later. Their divorce was finalized in September that year and the couple split their $25.3 million assets in half, according to People.

Following credits in college theatre shows like Guys and Dolls and Stage Door, Julie studied at the Actors Studio in New York. After early TV roles in shows like Loving and ER, she was cast as Virginia opposite Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore (1996). Julie has since appeared on Lost, Boston Legal and Horrible Bosses (2011). 

Of course, it’s as Claire Dunphy that she won over audiences across a run of 250 episodes. The matriarch of the Dunphy household, it’s Claire’s combination of a Type A efficiency with a warm nature that made her a favourite on the show, regularly calling her family of five into order and acting as a foil to husband Phil’s more laidback approach to parenting (or peerenting).

Julie Bowen recently reprised her role as Virginia for Happy Gilmore 2 (2025), now married to the titular Happy Gilmore who comes out of retirement to provide for his family on the golf course. She also appeared on the 2024 series Hysteria! as Linda Campbell, the mother to Dylan, who is part of a high school heavy metal band that decide to profit from the town’s growing interest in the occult by marketing themselves as a Satanic metal band.

Per IMDB, her next project is Taste, a series that follows a traditional food journalist as she works alongside a young TikTok chef. Development on the show was announced in late 2024, though updates since have been scarce.