If there's one Jack Pearson scene This Is Us fans are expecting from the second season, it's his death. But Milo Ventimiglia, who plays the family patriarch on the NBC drama, hopes the show will also explore more about his character's past.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly's editorial director, Jess Cagle, Ventimiglia brought up Jack's service during the Vietnam War.
The show's first season gave us a glimpse into Jack's younger days, when he was a Vietnam veteran living at home and struggling to make ends meet. But we don't know much about Jack's time abroad.
"I would love to explore that era of Jack when he was a young man in Vietnam," Ventimiglia said on The Jess Cagle Interview. "I feel like there's 50-some years of this man's life, and we've only seen 18 hours of it."
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The actor raises a good point. Fans seem to be obsessed with finding out how Jack died, but what about how he lived?
"Before the conversation even came up about Jack's real history — even outside of his bad childhood with his father — in my mind, I'd always seen Jack as a Vietnam vet," Ventimiglia told Cagle. The actor has said in the past that he used his own father, who served in Vietnam, as inspiration for his character.
"My dad is such a great man… I know even though he presented himself as put-together, I know that war impacted him and affected him," Ventimiglia told Cagle. "I would start to pull those feelings I saw from my own father into Jack."
Flashbacks to Jack's Vietnam days would definitely add more depth to his character. So far, most of what we've seen from him involved him planning a robbery in the early '70s — a plan halted, of course, when he saw Rebecca (Mandy Moore) for the first time. Showing how the war affected Jack would be a great move for This Is Us.
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