‘This Is Us’ star meets Tom Hanks’ Fred Rogers
PASADENA, Calif. — For “This Is Us” star Susan Kelechi Watson, who plays Beth, Pittsburgh keeps coming at her.
Pittsburgh is a location in the NBC drama, her character’s husband, Randall (Sterling K. Brown), grew up in the ’Burgh, and Ms. Watson spent a month here last year filming “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” the film that stars Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and is due in theaters Nov. 22.
“Pittsburgh had never been a stop on my itinerary, so when I got there I didn’t know what to expect,” she said following an NBC press conference late last month at the Television Critics Association winter 2019 press tour.
She raved about visits to local museums and was astonished by Pittsburghers’ love for the Steelers. She was advised to look out her Downtown hotel window on a game day.
“I went to the window, and literally the street was just — from all different directions — like veins in a body, streams of black and gold,” she said. “I just thought how this is such an awesome way for people to connect and just feel like a community.”
During her time in Mister Rogers’ neighborhood, Ms. Watson plays Andrea Vogel, the wife of the journalist (Matthew Rhys, “The Americans”) whose life is changed by interviewing Mister Rogers.
“[She’s] a woman who’s recently taken time off of work, because they’ve just had their first child, dealing with a 2month-old and how that’s shifting her life and how it doesn’t quite seem to be shifting her husband’s life,” she said. “What struggle that creates for their marriage and for their relationship and watching how Mister Rogers comes into that and changes their life.”
Ms. Watson described filming in Mr. Rogers’ real studio at WQED and praised her sweater-clad co-star.
“[It’s] just extraordinary [how] Tom Hanks is. Not only as an actor — we know how extraordinary he is as an actor and an acting lesson in and of himself — but as a person he is just kind, generous, warm,” she said. “Is it bad to say normal? So normal. You think, how is a person this famous and extraordinary and recognized for his
work and everything else, just this down to earth?”
Ms. Watson grew up watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Sesame Street.”
“PBS was just such an awesome resource for a child’s early development,” she said. “And now I realize ‘Mister Rogers’ is also an awesome resource for an adult’s development because his philosophies are just timeless and are so relevant and are so important and are so simple and just something we can all grasp onto easily.”
Her time filming in Pittsburgh also gave Ms. Watson insight she can bring to her role on “This Is Us,” which returns with a new episode next week.
“It does give me an idea of what it’s like, especially with the demographic and how the composition of it is and what Randall may have gone through living there and going to college there,” she said. “They meet in college so Beth will eventually experience what it is to be in Pittsburgh. It’s nice to have that foundation, to know where your character has been.”
‘Gotham’ farewell
Fox has dubbed the final season of “Gotham” (8 p.m. Thursday, WPGH-TV) “Legend of the Dark Knight,” and it includes a 10-year flash forward that shows Bruce Wayne in full Batman cowl. And, yes, actor David Mazouz, who plays Bruce, will be seen under the cowl and heard offering his own Batman rasp. But it’s a stuntman in the suit.
“David is a strapping young man, but our Batman suit is for someone 6 foot 4,” said “Gotham” executive producer John Stephens.
Mr. Stephens acknowledged producers held back some stories in previous seasons, but this year they’re using it all, including the introduction of Bane (Shane West).
“We wanted to create a canon that was inside the canon and outside the [established Batman] canon,” Mr. Stephens said.