American singer/songwriter and actress Mandy Moore makes her big comeback with This Is Us, going straight to the awards nominations list — The Golden Globes as well as The Critics Choice Awards. Famous for her roles in A Walk To Remember, Chasing Liberty, Because I Said So, License to Wed and more, she's also fondly remembered for her guest role as patient Mary Portman on the TV series Grey’s Anatomy. In This Is Us, Moore plays ‘Mom’ Pearson, the matriarch of the Pearson family and Jack’s loving wife, Rebecca. On the show, she has three kids with Jack and like every character on the series, Rebecca, too, has an intriguing back story.
Let’s talk about that tush that had everyone raving. Milo’s tush got a lot of air-time. What was going on there? And what was it like spending an entire day with that tush?
Mandy Moore: (Laughs) It was actually the first day of shooting, the first very scene of Season 1 and
I felt like how lovely it is that a woman does not have to show herself and a man shows himself instead! But he was just so comfortable. So in the first scene, he had a little towel like he was meant to be naked and in between takes, he wasn’t grabbing the robe, he was just so chilled out about it.
And how were you at the time?
MM: (Laughs) I was okay. I wasn’t complaining (laughing). He has a nice tush.
What’s with all the prosthetics? You make a great 66-year-old as you do a 23-year-old!
MM: Funny enough, the show was picked up and Dan (Fogelman,
series creator) said, two weeks
before we started shooting, ‘I have this idea, I want you to potentially play this woman present-day, and if it doesn’t work and nobody buys it like a hundred per cent, then we’ll table the idea and we’ll cast an older actress. But I really want to go for it’. And I had about six different make-up tests until everybody
was satisfied.
So the decades move around a lot in the course of the season!
MM: Yeah, I mean, you’ll first get to see Rebecca from 1972, before she met Jack — right till the present-day and that’s 23 years old to about 66 or so.
It’s funny because you have said before that you loved those past decades…
MM: Yeah, I feel like I was born in the wrong decade.
And now you’re in it!
MM: Yeah, I get to live in it. Not as much as I would like because a lot of our story is central to the time when our kids are about eight years old, so that’s about 1988. But I do love visiting the ’70s and all of the fashion and the music and young Rebecca is like, we’re the same with our musical tastes too!
Season 2 of This Is Us airs on Star World every Saturday at 9 pm