Sarah Hyland

The Myth of the Perfect Body

Sarah Hyland was filming Modern Family with dialysis tubes taped to her back. Nobody on set knew except a couple of people she trusted completely. She played the bubbly, healthy teen while her kidneys were failing from a congenital dysplasia she had been living with since birth.

Television is deceiving.

She was born in Manhattan in 1990 and grew up backstage in her parents' dressing rooms, as they were also actors. By age four, she was already looking for work in TV commercials, and in 1997 she landed a small role in the film Private Parts. But her life was never that of a conventional child star, because the hospital was her second home.

In 2009, she signed on to play Haley Dunphy on ABC. The show became a global ratings hit, and Hyland was earning 100,000 dollars per episode by the final stages of production. And although audiences saw a carefree girl, the reality was that she could barely stay on her feet between takes.

The Operating Room as Routine

In 2012, she received her first kidney transplant, donated by her father. Doctors expected a standard recovery, but the actress's body rejected the organ years later. She fell into a deep depression and came to believe she was a burden on her family because of a defective genetic condition.

Her younger brother volunteered as a donor in 2017 for a second transplant. The surgery was a medical success, but the postoperative recovery overlapped with filming the final seasons of her flagship series. Sarah Hyland has undergone 16 surgeries, including hernia operations and treatments for endometriosis.

There was no room for rest.

Despite the physical pain, she never missed a day of work on the Los Angeles set. Makeup artists used specific techniques to hide the chronic fatigue and the facial swelling caused by constant use of corticosteroids. But she insisted that work was the only way to avoid feeling like a full-time patient.

Production and Returning to the Stage

In 2019, she decided she didn't want to depend only on outside casting and became an executive producer on the film The Wedding Year. She wanted to control the creative process and understand how money moved behind the cameras in Hollywood. It was her first step toward diversifying a career that many had written off after the end of the comedy that made her rich.

In 2022, she took on the role of host of Love Island USA for the Peacock streaming service. The change of pace surprised the industry, but viewership data justified her multimillion-dollar contract for two consecutive seasons. In this way, she showed that her public image worked beyond fictional scripts.

In 2024, she returned to her theater roots in New York. She starred in the musical Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside Theatre, playing Audrey with a vocal power that New York critics didn't expect. The production required eight shows a week and a physical workload that tested her stamina after years of intensive medical treatment.

In 2023, the Peacock streaming platform canceled Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin despite having previously announced a renewal. The decision came after delays caused by the writers' strike and rising logistics production costs. The studio shut the project down for good and released the actors from their exclusive contracts in 2024.