It’s tough to imagine This Is Us without the mystery of Jack Pearson’s death. However, “there’s still so much to know” about him, Milo Ventimiglia revealed in a new interview following the Sunday, February 4, episode.
“There are so many questions with Jack. His upbringing, what happened to him in Vietnam, what happened to him after Vietnam before he met Rebecca? And those early days of Jack and Rebecca, I know is an era that Dan is excited to explore,” Ventimiglia, 40, told Esquire magazine. “His brother, I think is something that’s going to come up relatively quickly, and play out over the next season or so. There’s still so much to know about this man, from all the eras, so I’m excited to focus on how Jack lived as opposed to worrying about how he died.” (Read Us Weekly’s full recap here!)
Jack was not killed in the house fire but suffered from a heart attack afterward from the amount of smoke he inhaled. In one of the toughest scenes to watch, Rebecca (Mandy Moore) is at the hospital vending machine getting a candy bar, when the doctor alerts her that Jack has passed away. However, there was also a special message in the scene.
“It’s so human, so simple, just the disbelief. And if you caught this, when she’s at the vending machine, you hear Jack say ‘Bec?,’” Ventimiglia revealed. “I had recorded a lot of different versions of that, some that were a little more ethereal like I was whispering. You’ll have to ask Dan [Fogelman], but my belief is that it’s a presence. That was Jack saying ‘Bec?’ She turns her head and everything.”
Going forward, Ventimiglia will still be a large part of the show, and Fogelman recently revealed that it’s possible you’ll even see him in present tense or in the future as part of a dream sequence. “We play with a lot of things around time and memory and what could have been, so I think that’s definitely a possibility,” he told Glamour magazine. “There’s a lot of emotions because if you’ve lost someone tragically, you dream about them a lot.”
Fogelman also adds that Kate’s wedding will be a big part of the next part of the season — from the planning, to the bachelorette party, to the ceremony. So is it possible that one of those dreams could show Jack walking her down the aisle?
“You’re not exactly right, but you could actually be in a place where something like that could happen,” he added.
This Is Us airs on NBC Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET.
