This Is Us producer, cast talk new season

First episode’s big revelation leads to further questions about what happened in past

Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for This Is Us. LOS ANGELES— As This Is Us viewers sorted out the big revelation about Jack Pearson’s death in Tuesday’s Season 2 premiere, a Hollywood audience had the best analytical help available: executive producer Dan Fogelman and the cast of the NBC hit drama.

They offered hints about the coming season and thoughts about the episode, whose final twist revealed that patriarch Jack’s death, a subject of huge fan speculation, results from a fire that gutted the family’s house.

Although the charred house provides one big answer, Milo Ventimiglia, who plays the father of three, said: “There’s still a lot of questions,” including the cause of the fire and whether Jack died in it or survived until later.

“All the answers about how Jack died and seeing how Jack died, it’s all going to happen this season,” Fogelman said.

Mandy Moore, who plays Jack’s wife Rebecca, pointed to some intriguing clues introduced in the final minutes of the episode, which focused on Jack’s and Rebecca’s brief marital split in the past, and their adult children trying to achieve life and career goals in the present.

She was referring to brief scenes involving the siblings in the aftermath of his death: Kate holds a dog, Randall has a girlfriend and Kevin’s leg is in a cast.

The stories behind those details and others will help in “figuring out a bigger piece of the puzzle (related to) this monumental event in the life of this family,” Moore said.

In order to keep the episode’s ending secret, producers didn’t provide an advance screener to critics and shot the burned house scene with Moore just a week and a half before the premiere at a location far from the show’s sound stages.

Fogelman and the cast teased intriguing elements about the coming season and what it will mean for Jack, Rebecca and their three children, Kate (Chrissy Metz), Kevin (Justin Hartley) and Randall (Sterling K. Brown), who all celebrate their 37th birthday in the currentday timeline in Tuesday’s premiere.

Be prepared for surprises involving Kevin, who is acting in a Ron Howard movie in Los Angeles while trying to maintain his rekindled relationship with ex-wife Sophie (Alexandra Breckenridge), who lives in New York.

The relationship between Rebecca and daughter Kate will be explored, starting in next Tuesday’s episode (9 p.m. on CTV).

“Kate never feels like she could ever fill the shoes of her mom; she’s not pretty enough or thin enough. We’ll come to see how and why she feels that way,” Metz says. “Both of them are neither right or wrong.”

Kate, Toby and Rebecca also will be involved with each other in a significant story.

Viewers will get a better idea of Metz’s impressive singing skills in coming episodes, Fogelman says. In Tuesday’s premiere, Kate, who dreams of a singing career, performed briefly at an audition before the man in charge stops her in favour of another singer.

Besides the serious details, the actors were most impressed by the fake smoking scene involving Randall and his wife, Beth (Susan Kelechi Watson), after their differences over Randall’s mission to adopt boil over. Initially, the actors thought their characters would be sharing an imaginary joint, but executive producer Ken Olin suggested an imaginary cigarette.

“It changed the whole tone of the scene,” Watson said, praising Olin’s decision.

“It was therapeutic,” Brown said, looking at Watson. “You were trying to relieve the stress. Before, we were just trying to get high.”