NBC’s This Is Us has captured the attention of audiences in a big way since its premiere in September 2016. While the whole show is intriguing, interesting and entertaining, the viewers were most puzzled by the way Jack Pearson (Milo Ventimiglia) died. That was finally revealed during a recent post-Super Bowl episode.
The episode shows Jack Pearson rushing into his burning home in order to save some priceless family artifacts and a family dog. We find out that Jack actually left the house with second-degree burns on his hands and suffering from smoke inhalation. When he went to the hospital to get treated, Jack, unfortunately, dies due to cardiac arrest caused by the severity of smoke in his lungs. This leads to the series’ most heartbreaking scene when ER doctor treating Jack tells his wife Rebecca Pearson (Mandy Moore) that they could not save her husband.
After the episode aired, Milo Ventimiglia sat down with Entertainment Weekly and decided to give the fans some insight into the death scene and what’s next for his character.
“I don’t want to say a relief, but I think it was acceptance.” – said Ventimiglia when asked how he felt after shooting the scene. “First off, I had to lay as still as I could because poor Mandy Moore, she did not know that I was going to be laying there [in the hospital bed].”
“The difficulty for me was the logistics of the fire. We were working in a controlled way with live flames, but still, it’s fire.” – he added. ” But then the other hardest [part] was just making sure that I wasn’t in the performance giving any indication that these are the last moments that the kids are going to see their father or Rebecca is going to see Jack. Everything had to be played in a way that was, ‘We think Jack’s okay — he’s okay’.”
Ventimiglia also said that this doesn’t mean we have seen the last of Jack Pearson in This Is Us and that there are many things to be revealed about the character.
“This is episode 14, so that’s only the 32nd hour we’ve ever known this family.” – said the 4-year-old actor. “So now, if Jack died in 1998 when the kids are 17, there’s still a lot to know, different sides of him, what made him, what shaped him, what inspired his romance with his wife, what happened with him and his brother in the war. That we’ve invested as much as we have as an audience in 32 hours is pretty remarkable. There’s a lot of life left in him, even in death, there’s a lot of life left in Jack.”
