Mandy Moore is sharing a confession to recollect.
The actress, 40, acquired candid on the demise of her character Rebecca Pearson’s husband, Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia), on the NBC drama “This Is Us.”
On Tuesday’s episode of the “That Was Us” podcast, Moore and her co-hosts, Sterling Ok. Brown and Chris Sullivan, sat down with the collection’ creator, Dan Fogelman, to debate Season 2 Episode 14, titled “Super Bowl Sunday.”
The “Walk To Remember” star famous she felt “relief” when the episode aired because it lastly revealed how Jack died.
“We were just holding on to the secret,” Moore stated.
“Now this woman can just put the pieces of her life back together and start putting one foot in front of the other and moving on,” she recalled of Rebecca.
Wanting again, Moore shared, “There was so much anxiety of ‘How do we do this? How do we do this well?’”
“There’s so much anticipation,” she continued. “There were so many eyeballs on how is this going to go that once that was out of the picture, it was such relief.”
Fogelman, 49, added that the present went to nice lengths to preserve Jack’s reason behind demise a secret. He additionally discovered it “scary” to disclose what truly occurred to the beloved character.
“Milo had become this character that people were just like obsessed with,” recounted Fogelman.
“I think a lot of shows might have tried to pull it out longer,” he added.
Early on, the writers knew that Jack would die after he suffered a coronary heart assault following a home hearth. However Fogelman stated it “never occurred” to him that the “mystery” of Jack’s demise could be greater than a “small component” of the present.
“It wasn’t until the first episode started screening and people were like, ‘Where’s the dad?’” he shared. “And it took on a life of its own … And in some ways, I think that became our superpower early on, which was we had this propulsive mystery underneath what was otherwise a very intimate small family drama. We had this big question and mystery that I actually hadn’t planned on being that crazy.”
Regardless of feeling consolation after the episode was out on this planet, filming the heart-shattering storyline was troublesome.
Moore recalled how taking pictures felt bodily exhausting, including she spent “two or three weeks” crying by way of the scenes.
On the time, Fogelman’s assistant, Jake, recommended sending Moore a clown to assist cheer her up.
“And I was like, Jake, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he stated on the podcast. “We’re not sending Mandy Moore a clown.”
“This Is Us” ran from 2016 to 2022 for a complete of six seasons on NBC. Viewers adopted Rebecca in varied life levels, together with watching her as a younger mother and as an aged grandma whose well being deteriorates.
“I feel like the writers have just nailed it, from when we introduced that part of the storyline,” Moore informed “Today” in 2022 of Rebecca’s bodily decline.
“I think being able to sort of see that broad scope of the totality of a disease like this, and the toll that it takes on the family in general, has been really important, but hard not to let my own grief for what’s happening to the character supersede. Because she’s so dignified in her response to what she knows is coming for her,” she continued. “So it’s like, not letting that interfere with what the character is going through has been the most challenging part, like going back to my trailer and just letting myself have the emotion.”
