Three years have passed since This Is Us’ series finale shut the book on the Pearson family saga, and yet it’s pretty amazing how quickly those emotions can come flooding back. The NBC ensemble drama had a way of bringing the tears — both happy and sad — over its six-season run, and Justin Hartley’s reaction to rewatching one of the series’ most brutally heartbreaking scenes has me back in my feelings.
The series centered around the Pearson family: Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), his wife Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and their children, the Big Three — Kevin (Justin Hartley), Kate (Chrissie Metz) and Randall (Sterling K. Brown), who they adopted after he was abandoned at a fire station. There was always tension between Kevin and Randall, especially after Jack died of heart failure following a house fire (sorry, Crock-Pot).
The sibling rivalry came to a head in the Season 4 finale, when the brothers went for the jugular, Randall telling Kevin that their father had died ashamed of him, and Kevin responding with an equally cruel sentiment, saying:
You know, I used to think the worst thing that happened to me was the day that Dad died. It’s the day they brought you home. Hand to God, Randall, the worst thing that ever happened to me was the day they brought you home.
Justin Hartley relived that scene in a segment with People, and he wore the most pained expression on his face as he pleaded with his character:
Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t. There you go. He said it twice.
Seeing the regret Justin Hartley had that Kevin could say that to his brother made me tear up in the same way it did when I first watched the scene back in 2020. It was awful, but it was also so authentic to the characters. Hartley explained:
That scene is decades of pain and misunderstanding and built-up resentment and envy and jealousy and also decades of love being misunderstood and probably decades of both people being right. A lot of awful things were said in that one conversation. Of course it could have been handled better, I'm sure. But that's family, right? Sometimes that's family.
That was also the beauty of This Is Us. The way the writers jumped around in time to explore the Big Three in different stages of their lives gave us so much context into their thoughts and actions. It also showed them as flawed characters, with Justin Hartley acknowledging the brothers could have handled the situation differently, but that’s often not what happens in real life.
Over the first four seasons we were shown so many layers to these characters that by the time Kevin and Randall faced off in that episode, we knew how much Randall struggled to fit in with his white family. We also knew how much Kevin resented the extra attention his brother got from their parents because of that, making their insults toward each other cut so deep. Justin Hartley said:
That is brilliant writing. That's brilliant acting by Sterling. And I was fortunate to be on set that day and be in that scene and share that with him. That show had countless scenes like that, with all of the characters. All of the characters on that show were written with such delicate hands and thoughts, and they were so individual. It was that perfect. It was that perfect.
That’s a hard point to argue, with its cast and crew being nominated for dozens of Emmy Awards during its six seasons. It’s also hard to argue how much of an impact a show has had when simply rewatching a scene from five years ago can elicit all the same emotions it did the first time.
Luckily for us, we can still revisit any part of the Pearson family timeline, as all six seasons of This Is Us are available to stream with a Hulu subscription.
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