Fans aren’t the only ones who break down over “This Is Us.”
Star Milo Ventimiglia got emotional over the weekend during a panel discussion about the show at PaleyFest in Hollywood.
The actor was explaining that he draws inspiration for his character Jack Pearson from his own father, Peter, who was in the audience with Ventimiglia’s mother, Carol.
“Here we go, you’re going to find me crying,” Ventimiglia said.
He then got choked up.
“There’s not a moment in my life where I don’t think about how he raised us, my sisters [Laurel and Leslie] and I,” the actor said. “And what he gave me, just as a man.”
The hit NBC series ended its emotionally charged first season recently.
The ensemble cast drama revolves around the Pearson family.
It time hops between the past, when Jack Pearson and wife Rebecca (Mandy Moore) are raising their young family, and present day, when the family’s patriarch has died and the Pearson children are adults.
There has been much angst about how exactly Jack Pearson dies and the cast didn’t reveal any spoilers at Paleyfest.
Moderator Kristin Dos Santos of E! News got the cast to debunk a few fan theories including that Jack dies during 9/11 or that his wife kills him.
The show’s creator Dan Fogelman said in a recent interview with CNN that he knows exactly where the series is headed.
“We know the full picture of the family in the writer’s room — I know it in my brain,” Fogelman said. “But as far as what the audience is going to see every week, they’re going to be getting it in bits and pieces.”
The Paleyfest audience also learned that Ventimiglia has some music video experience.
It was revealed during a game of “How well do you know your cast mate” that he starred in the video for Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry (Personal).”
