Ariel Winter reveals traumatic experience with cockroaches as child star

Modern Family star Ariel Winter is not a fan of cockroaches, but her trigger may run deeper than the typical insect gross-out.

On the latest episode of Fox reality show Stars on Mars, the celebs encountered a dead roach while cleaning their communal living space on the faux Red Planet. Contestant Lance Armstrong picked it up with his bare hand and teased Winter by holding it up to her, which caused her to lose it and threaten to kick the former professional cyclist "in the balls." (You'll have to forgive the actress for not knowing that Armstrong famously had one testicle removed after a cancer battle in 1996, as she only just figured out he is not astronaut Neil Armstrong.)

Fox Ariel Winter on 'Stars on Mars'

"Lance really likes to push buttons, but, like honestly, that was not a good choice," she said in a confessional after the incident. She later revealed to fellow explorer Natasha Leggero that her phobia is actually a factor of trauma stemming back to her years of being forced to work as a child star, which she's spoken about candidly on the reality show.

She explained that when she was a kid of "like 7 or 8" she was working on a very low-budget movie alongside another child actor playing her brother and that they were supposed to be children abandoned by their mom. "They brought in buckets of roaches," she recalled. "There was a few on me and, like, around me and they crawled across his face and they, I mean, just everywhere, and ever since then I've had major phobia."

Winter didn't name the movie, but her plot description seems to match Life Is Hot in Cracktown, which was released in 2009. A Variety review at the time described "prepubescent tyke Willy (Ridge Canipe) and his younger sister Suzie (Ariel Winter), stuck in a cockroach-infested welfare hotel while their drug-addict mom (Illeana Douglas) and her short-fuse b.f. (Edoardo Ballerini) vanish for days at a time."

Stars on Mars airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.

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