Mandy Moore almost didn’t make it to This Is Us. The teen icon and musician was coming off of years of rejection, a string of network pilots that didn’t make the cut and B movies that met critical derision and worse at the box office. She hated auditioning. She hadn’t released an album in almost a decade, despite first finding fame as a singer, and considered turning away from the entertainment industry.
But fate has a way of intervening. The This Is Us pilot came her way at a low point and promised something different—she just needed to nab the part, and from there, for NBC to pick the show up to series. “My heart has been broken repeatedly for the last four years by this world,” Moore recalls telling her team after receiving the script. “I don’t know if I’m strong-willed enough to face another sense of rejection.”
There’s a lot, it turns out, Moore didn’t know about herself going into This Is Us. That goes for viewers too—put bluntly, the former teen idol isn’t who most would think of for a role like Rebecca Pearson, which ultimately demanded so much emotional depth, dramatic range, and technical precision. Yet from the moment Moore showed up on the pilot’s set to film her two days’ worth of scenes, she felt determined to give it everything she had. “I’d heard [she’d been] questioning sticking around acting, and I think she went into it just not ready to let it go,” recalls Milo Ventimiglia, who plays her husband, Jack. “She had a bit of a fire, a bit of unfinished business with acting, going into the whole series six years ago. I saw that really quickly in her.”
Over its six-season run, which concluded Tuesday, This Is Us became one of TV’s most popular shows, unfurling constant twists in its epic, time-hopping portrait of a complex American family. Moore’s Rebecca proved central to the ambitious conceit—with her powerhouse performance increasingly essential to its success. Rebecca exists in one timeline in the pilot, a 30-something mother beset by tragedy and then a miracle. As the series continues we come to know her as a teenager, a new grandmother, and an older woman approaching the end of her life—sometimes, all in the same episode, with Moore portraying her at each age. The actor had no idea this was the plan upon signing on. “Had I been told going into this audition, ‘This is what the show is going to be, this is what you can expect,’ I would’ve been like, Oh no, no, no, no,” Moore tells me. “I can’t do that. I’m a 31-year-old woman. There’s no way; I have no life experience. I don’t have the bandwidth to even imagine what any of that would be.”
Moore expresses a sense of gratitude repeatedly during our conversation. Over Zoom, she’s warm, thoughtful, and clearly emotional, tearing up in a few instances as she continues to reflect on the project that changed her life. (“I feel overwhelmed,” she says early on.) Not only did This Is Us come to her at the right time, but it was presented in the right way to convince her to give it one more go. Dan Fogelman, the creator of This Is Us, got to know Moore in the animated hit Tangled, which he wrote and for which Moore voiced the lead role of Rapunzel. He saw in her what others didn’t. “She’d been famous for a really long time at a very young age, she held herself together normally, personally, but had this kind of quality about her that led people to keep casting her in romantic-comedy parts,” Fogelman says. “There was something about her that I always felt could go much deeper and a little darker if required—really heavy material that she hadn’t yet explored as an actress.”
Moore’s persona plays into the way we meet—and, in the final season, say goodbye—to Rebecca Pearson. The young mother is ebullient, with a brilliant smile and a boisterous laugh. It’s the Mandy Moore we know, at her most appealingly familiar. Episode two then punctures expectations: There’s the actor in a new wig and old-age makeup, the character now in her late 60s. This Rebecca speaks in a hushed hurry, carrying decades of regret over her now slightly arched back, as she navigates grandparenting and a second marriage. Is this a gimmick gone very wrong? As Moore holds her adult children—played by Justin Hartley, Chrissy Metz, and Sterling K. Brown, all of whom are older than her in real life—in an intimate maternal gaze, she slowly holds us there too. It’s mesmerizing—and, frankly, bizarre. The longer you stick with it, the more remarkably convincing—invisible, really—Moore’s transformation becomes.