Mandy Moore is sharing a confession to remember.
The actress, 40, got candid on the death 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 K. Brown and Chris Sullivan, sat down with the series’ creator, Dan Fogelman, to discuss Season 2 Episode 14, titled “Super Bowl Sunday.”
The “Midway” alum noted she felt “relief” after the cast shot and released the episode since it finally revealed how Jack died.
“We were just holding on to the secret,” Moore admitted.
“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.
Looking back, 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 show went to great lengths to keep Jack’s cause of death a secret. He also found it “scary” to reveal what actually happened 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 heart attack following a house fire. But, Fogelman said it “never occurred” to him that the “mystery” of Jack’s demise would be more than a “small component” of the show.
“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.”
Despite feeling comfort after the episode was out in the world, filming the heart-shattering storyline was difficult.
Moore recalled how shooting felt physically exhausting, adding she spent “two or three weeks” crying through the scenes.
At the time, Fogelman’s assistant, Jake, suggested sending Moore a clown to help cheer her up.
“And I was like, Jake, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said on the podcast. “We’re not sending Mandy Moore a clown.”
“This Is Us” ran from 2016 to 2022 for a total of six seasons on NBC. Viewers followed Rebecca in various life stages, including watching her as a young mom and as an elderly grandma whose health deteriorated.
“I feel like the writers have just nailed it, from when we introduced that part of the storyline,” Moore said to Today in 2022.
“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 sort of like 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.”
