The Pearson family sticks together, onscreen and off. Susan Kelechi Watson tells Us Weekly exclusively that the This Is Us cast uses group texts to cheer each other on.
“Mostly it’s catching up with people,” the 36-year-old actress told Us at the Fahrenheit 451 premiere in New York on Tuesday, May 8. “We see someone’s doing something fabulous like with [Chrissy Metz’s] book or Mandy [Moore] climbing Kilimanjaro or somebody’s birthday or Sterling [K. Brown] on SNL.”
She added of the “bananas” text chain: “Sometimes we see something funny, and we throw it up on there [and] like say, ‘Hey, this is your cousin.’ Like something stupid. We just like to have fun and keep in touch.”
Watson, who plays Beth Pearson on the NBC hit, follows through on that support outside the group text, too. In April, she attended Moore’s bachelorette party in Big Sur and stood by Brown’s side as he was honored at the Time 100 gala.
Season 3 of This Is Us won’t premiere until the fall, but Watson already has an idea about her character’s progression: “I don’t know that much yet. I do know that it’s kind of picking up where we left off with Deja having a lot of trouble adjusting since she feels her mom abandoned her and how that leaves Randall and [Beth’s] relationship and how we have to figure out this new … I guess, it’s our new issue or the next family thing, you know, about William is [like] Deja and how we are going to make this one big happy family, but it seems to be proving harder than we thought.”
Though Beth has faced her fair share of struggles thus far, fans look up to the matriarch. Watson views her character on a simpler level. “I’ve never thought about her strength. I’ve never thought about her patience. I never thought about those things,” she told Us. “I just thought, ‘How do we get through this right now in the best way we know how,’ and that’s how I continue to play it. So being an actor and hearing what people say can be two very different things, and I try not to overanalyze it. I’m happy that that’s the way it lands for people. I’m happy that people connect with her.”
This Is Us will return to NBC this fall.
