Mandy Moore is looking back on the moment when This Is Us fans finally learned that Jack Pearson died in the infamous Super Bowl episode.
“There was, like, relief,” Moore, 40, said on the Tuesday, March 18, episode of her “That Was Us” rewatch podcast. “We were holding onto this secret and, I think as an actor, getting through 214 and 215 [with] the aftermath of the funeral and everything, it was, like, 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.”
According to Moore, there was “so much anxiety” in the story line.
“Like, ‘How do we do this? How do we do this well?’” she recalled on the podcast. “There’s so much anticipation [and] I felt, like, there were so many eyeballs on how this was gonna go. Once that was out of the picture, it was such a relief.”
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This Is Us, created by Dan Fogelman, aired on NBC from 2016 to 2022. The series followed the Pearson family across decades. Moore played matriarch Rebecca, who was married to Jack (Milo Ventimiglia). The show also starred Sterling K. Brown (Randall), Justin Hartley (Kevin) and Chrissy Metz (Kate) as the three adult Pearson children.
In the middle of season 2, it was revealed that Jack — who previously did not appear in the modern timeline — had died when the Big Three siblings were 18. After surviving a house fire, Jack died due to cardiac issues several hours later.
“It was scary because it had taken on a life of its own,” Fogelman, 49, said on the podcast episode. “Milo had become this character that people were just, like, obsessed with, like, TV Dad Jack. It had become such a big part of our conversation [and] it was exciting to discard it and be able to focus on what comes next.”
Fogelman also wasn’t interested in “pulling [the story line] out longer.”
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“I was of the mind of, like, ‘This is where it should happen,’” he explained. “There was even a moment where [NBC] wanted to change our scheduling in the second season of the show. They wanted to change our night and I threw a conniption. The main way we won was by me saying, like, ‘No, I have a very specific plan of when we’re going to do Jack’s death. It has to be on the Super Bowl. This would ruin the plan creatively.’ I was able to win the day on keeping us on Tuesday nights because of that.”
Per Fogelman, he “started asking” if This Is Us could precede the 2018 Super Bowl “right away.”
“I knew the Super Bowl was going to be on NBC [that year and] I knew we were laying in that the family was a family of football fans,” he said. “We had established the Terrible Towel in the pilot and all that. It was network TV and I just wanted that slot for something big and particularly that episode.”
