This Is Us Star Mandy Moore Opens Up About Rebecca's Heartbreaking Reveal

Source: NBC

Warning: If you haven’t watched the Season 3 finale of This Is Us there are major spoilers ahead.

Rebecca Pearson (Mandy Moore) has been through a lot during the first three seasons of This Is Us. She has raised three children and suffered the loss of her husband Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), but at the same time, she has been the rock of her family and has kept a sunny disposition while enduring great tragedy. In the Season 3 finale, the story jumped into the distant future, and while Rebecca was still alive, the heartbreaking reveal was that her life was coming to an end. Now, fans will now have to wait for months to find out her fate.

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During the episode titled “Her,” they storyline jumped decades into the future, and we found the Pearson family gathering at Kevin’s (Justin Hartley) house to give the Pearson matriarch a final farewell. Randall (Sterling K. Brown) walked into a bedroom to find his mom laying in bed with her brother-in-law Nicky (Griffin Dunne) by her side.

Randall reminded his mom who he was – twice – but she didn’t appear to recognize him. Rebecca was in her own world, and that was the end of Season 3. The episode answered a few questions, but left fans with a bunch of new ones, including where was Miguel (Jon Huertas)? When did Nicky come back? And, of course, what happened with Toby (Chris Sullivan) and Kate (Chrissy Metz)?

Moore recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly, and she revealed that the cast didn’t find about the final scene until the day before shooting. She says those lines were redacted in the script, so it was a big surprise to the cast to find out what was happening as Season 3 came to a close.

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Moore says she is glad that they are starting to tell this part of the story, and even though she can’t give any details about what her character is facing, there is “clearly something going on.”

“And in that sense, she’s just not the vibrant woman that I’ve known for the last three seasons. So to see her in that place is pretty… heartbreaking, you know?” said Moore.

She added that the final scene probably takes place in the last couple weeks of Rebecca’s life, but it still isn’t clear if her character has Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia, even though Randall said his name twice. She says that Rebecca’s illness will be revealed in the next season or two, but she and the rest of the cast already know the details because show creator Dan Fogelman has been planning this for a while.

Moore explained that playing a much older version of Rebecca feels like a whole new character, but that is the best part of starring on This Is Us. She says that it is always a challenge because one week you are playing a 17-year-old and the next week you are 83.

As for what happened to Miguel, Moore says fans will learn more about his fate in upcoming seasons, and she can’t wait to do more scenes with Huertas, no matter what decade it is in.

Moore says she isn’t sure how many scenes she will be in as “future Rebecca,” but she hopes it isn’t too often because the makeup process is a challenge.

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“I know that this will factor into the series long term. There will definitely be more scenes in the future with Rebecca, but I don’t know to what degree…. This future world is a world that we will be living in on and off for the remainder of the series, to a certain degree,” said Moore.

The 34-year-old actress says that it has become obvious that Rebecca, not Jack, is the glue of the family, and she loved that that was the “overwhelming message” of the episode, if not the general theme of the show.

New episodes of This Is Us will return to NBC this fall.