A THIS IS US Family REUNION

Grab the tissues: Milo & Mandy have the inside scoop on season three.

I t can be a bit difficult to tell that Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia, who play a husband and wife on TV ’s This Is Us, aren’t actually married in real life—or that all the actors in television’s most emotionally affecting intergenerational family aren’t actually a real family at all.

“We all love each other,” says Moore, 34. “We truly feel like a family.”

Moore and Ventimiglia play Rebecca and Jack Pearson on the Golden Globe–nominated hit NBC drama, which tells the touching, often wrenching story of the close-knit Pearson clan in heart-rending flashbacks as well as in the present day.

“In a given day, Mandy and I have been in scenes from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s,” Ventimiglia says. “It’s fun to jump back in time. The ’80s are a happier time in the marriage and the kids are younger, while the ’90s are stressful because of what Jack and Rebecca are going through. It’s fun. It’s different from playing current-day scenes. There’s a bit of magic to it.”

As the series heads into its third season beginning Tuesday, Sept. 25, fans can expect even more intensely emotional storylines. Ventimiglia, 41, says that Jack’s experience in the war is going to be huge this season. “It’s going

to be a big story point,” he says. “We find out more about his brother, Nicky, which will be very interesting too.”

The Vietnam story is a personal one for Ventimiglia, whose father served in the war.

“I grew up talking about it with my father,” he says. “It’s fascinating to play that side of Jack’s history as we get to find out what made him the man he is.”

People are hungry for this kind of entertainment, Moore says. “The show is so heartfelt, but it’s never schmaltzy,” she says. “And there’s something really unifying about the common theme about this struggle of being human—the joys and the pain and everything in between.”