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This Is Us’ Milo Ventimiglia: ‘Perfect’ Jack Pearson is ‘Hard to Live Up To’ (Exclusive)

It’s not easy being Jack Pearson … just ask Milo Ventimiglia. The actor portrays Jack, the patriarch to the Pearson family, on the hit NBC show This Is Us, and admitted to Us Weekly that playing a character so beloved does come with some downsides. Watch the video above!

Related: 8 Heartwarming Quotes From ‘This Is Us’

Milo Ventimiglia discusses being jack
Milo Ventimiglia Us Weekly

“Jack is not a difficult man to embody but at times he’s hard to live up to,” Ventimiglia told Us. “The audience, everyone has put this man on a pedestal, they’ve called him perfect. But who he is, he’s a fallible man. He’s made his mistakes but I think, in his sincerity of wanting to correct them, on wanting to do better and just loving his family and loving his wife so simply, we aspire to be him.”

And while playing this character hasn’t changed the Gilmore Girls alum, he does admit that Jack has “reaffirmed how I’ve tried to live.”

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“You know, live fully, love fully, try and be good, accept your mistakes,” Ventimiglia, who teamed up with Duracell to educate people on the importance of having a working smoke detector in your house, told Us. “Try and correct them and just be a good person.”

Now that the audience knows that Jack passed away after suffering from cardiac arresting following the house fire, the actor is hoping that the focus shifts to how Jack lived in season 3.

Related: TV’s Most Shocking Deaths

kate-jack-this-is-us
Mackenzie Hancsicsak as Kate and Milo Ventimiglia as Jack on This Is Us. Ron Batzdorff/NBC

“If we look at the 36 episodes that we’ve had so far, we’ve only known Jack for 36 hours,” the actor explained to Us. “Even though we’ve covered and spanned a course of this man’s life, we’ve only really seen the tip of the iceberg, and I think there’s so much more to the depth of who this man is and how he became who he is to this family, to this marriage, to the audience that’s watching. I’m just excited to explore all that. There’s not decade I don’t want to touch. I even want to see Jack as a boy again and as a young teenager, as a young man and then again with his kids.”

This Is Us airs on NBC Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET.

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