(And by the way, he told her: “We did good.Youdid so good.")
“It’s hard to explain, but… you’ll do all those things with them.”
“It’s quite a thing, isn’t it?”
Milo Ventimiglia as Jack and Mandy Moore as Rebecca in ‘This Is Us’.Ron Batzdorff/NBC
“Us finding each other in the bar that night.”
“I don’t know.
Jack once again reassured Rebecca, “You don’t.
Mandy Moore as Rebecca and Milo Ventimiglia as Jack in ‘This Is Us’.Ron Batzdorff/NBC
You’ll see,” and a teary smile lit up her face.
Not trying to make you cry again.
How did this capper of a scene come to be?
Hang in there, it’s about to get deep in here.
That’s a really abstract complicated philosophical notion.
And if we have to do it in a linear way, that’s probably limiting.
He’s after something about why it doesn’t make sense to be afraid of death.”
Whatever the case, the scene resonated profoundly with the two actors bringing it to life.
“I loved that sense of comfort,” Moore says.
“That no one could have gotten Rebecca through that moment but Jack.
I really hope that that’s the case.'
I feel like it’s such a fitting note to end on.”
And a satisfying/inevitable one, in Ventimiglia’s view.
“I think everybody’s been waiting for that,” he says.
I was really touched by it.
I thought it was beautiful.
Doesn’t have to specify it.
Doesn’t have to spell it out.
Those three know their dad passed away and their mom is soon passing.
Andboom, there we are.
And we don’t really leave our loved ones.”
He also gravitated toward the less-is-so-much-more ethos of the scene.
“There was a confidence that I felt in it.”
Alas, there were concerns about the emotions of the last day tainting the emotions of the scene.
“I was like, ‘It’s all going to start getting really overwhelming,'” Fogelman says.
And my fear is that everybody’s just weeping… Because then the whole thing just gets overwrought."
Penultimate was perfect, they decided.
It was very emotional.
I remember being so daunted by the script, like, ‘How am I going to get through this?
I’ve read it four or five times!
And every time I’m just like an emotional mess!’
But in the end, it was like, ‘Oh!’
I just locked eyes with Milo was like, ‘I can do this.
I’ve got him by my side.
No problem.'"
To that end, Moore felt that a few tears were tonally appropriate.
We’ve got front, back on her, front, back on mine.
Besides assisting with the drying of her eyes, what else was he thinking while filming that scene?
“I knew the words front and back.
I didn’t have to think about anything.
I didn’t have to do anything.
Didn’t have to worry about props.
Didn’t have to worry about crossing the room.
Didn’t have to worry about kids.
I just was there, looking her in the eye, just saying the words.
That’s literally just pure existing.
At the end of it saying, ‘I love you’ is like… it’s justreal.”
Fogelman and Olin debated two different reveals for the moment that Rebecca sees Jack on the bed.
And that’s the one I chose.
I wanted to save his reveal until his line.
It was really powerful."
More powerful than he even thought.
“It was just a beautiful moment.
And everybody was crying.
Ventimiglia says he felt it from the beginning, and definitely in the caboose that day.
Yeah, it’s everything.”
