This Is Us star Susan Kelechi Watson ended her engagement to actor Justin Lincoln Smith. Watson shared the news in an Instagram Story post celebrating the election of President-elect Joe Biden Saturday. Watson, 38, and Lincoln got engaged in September 2019, and she has since deleted the announcement on her Instagram page.
“And I thought becoming single was gonna be the only eventful thing to happen to me this year,” Watson wrote on her Instagram Story, reports Entertainment Tonight. She was likely referring to the election, as she also celebrated Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ victory in another post. “The Next President and Vice President of these United States! JOE BIDEN and history maker KAMALA HARRIS!!!” she wrote, alongside a photo of the two.
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Watson and Smith announced their engagement in a pair of Instagram posts, where she showed off a sapphire engagement ring, reports PEOPLE. “Forever Ever,” they wrote. “They’ll say its love and they’ll never know it’s love. For when they call its name, it will answer to love without hesitation.” That post, along with others including Smith, have been deleted from Watson’s Instagram account.
Watson is best known for playing Beth Pearson on NBC’s family drama This Is Us, which just started its fifth season last month. In the series, her character is married to Sterling K. Brown’s Randall Pearson. The series does plan on touching on some real-world events, like the Black Lives Matter movement and the coronavirus pandemic. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Watson said she was excited to see how the show tackles this.
“What I’m proud of with this show is that we’ve been addressing a lot of these Black Lives Matter issues along the way anyway, so the way it’s coming at us now is in a whole new way, which as a Black woman is blowing my mind — it’s painful and yet I’m happy for the changes that are happening,” Watson told the magazine last month. “But I do believe that we’ve been showing an honest testimony of who we are. We’ve been bringing it to people in ways that they haven’t seen on television before, and also have shown what the struggle is as a Black child, compared to being a white child. My hope is that [the show] attacks it in an even stronger way directly related to the Black Lives Matter thing. That’s something that I’m very passionate about.”
New episodes of This Is Us air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC. Watson was nominated for the Critics Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama earlier this year. She and her co-stars also won the Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series Award at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2018 and 2019.
