Jesse Tyler Ferguson is letting it all out — well, most of it anyway — about an icky performance of Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, in which he costarred in 2009.

“I don’t know if I’ve told this story, but I was just thinking about this as we were ordering. When we were doing Spelling Bee, on a matinee day, because I’m thinking about like eating before a show,” the Modern Family alum explained on Tuesday’s episode of Sony Music Entertainment’s Dinner’s On Me Podcast. “The Palm across the street did, this big lobster dinner, and they invited us to come over, and so we had this incredible lobster dinner between shows.”

It sounds yummy, but the seafood feast was a very bad idea, as he recounted in, well, more detail than was needed.

“And then we came back that evening for the evening show, and you shouldn’t have a lobster dinner on a two-show day between shows. We were just like sh—ing,” Ferguson said, before addressing his guest, Shrinking‘s Michael Urie. “Michael, I had the worst gas. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna poop my pants.’ And I remember there was a point on stage. Where me and [costar] Sarah Saltzberg, Sarah was sitting on the bleachers in character, but the focus wasn’t on us.”

The five-time Emmy nominee explained that Saltzberg was known for making her costars laugh really hard. He made the mistake of whispering to her that he really had to go to bathroom.

“And she goes, ‘Oh gosh, you know, if you have intestinal things going on…my dad’s always [saying] like, it’s really bad to keep it in. You just got to let it out. You just, she’s making me laugh,” Ferguson said. “I basically fart on stage, and it’s so close to the audience. Someone in the audience goes, ‘Ew.’ And so that makes Sarah start laughing. She starts peeing herself.”

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Of course, the unintentional gross-out performance did nothing to stop Ferguson’s Hollywood ascent. While Modern Family lasted a whopping 11 seasons and only concluded in 2020, Ferguson has also been part of the casts of the movies Ice Age: Collision Course, an animated sequel from 2016, and the 2023 live-action film Cocaine Bear, which costarred Keri Russell and O’Shea Jackson Jr.