‘This Is Us’: Jack Knew ‘Something Bigger’ Was Wrong Before His Death, but Hid It From Rebecca

Before we finally saw Jack Pearson’s death on the Super Bowl episode of NBC‘s This Is Us, it looked like he might have survived the fire. That is because Jack was hiding the truth from his wife, Rebecca, and likely knew “something bigger” was wrong.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly last week, Milo Ventimiglia, who plays Jack, was asked if his character was trying to hide the severity of the effects of the house fire from Rebecca. He did not want her to be in the room to see him die.

“He could probably sit there and have his wife in the room and all of that, but I deep-down think maybe he knew and he didn’t want her to have to see that or be around for that — I don’t know the real answer behind that, but I do feel like Jack knew something was wrong,” Ventimiglia told the magazine.

This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman agreed with the Emmy-nominated actor. It is all in how Ventimiglia chose to play the scene where the doctor tells him about the dangers of ingesting so much soot and smoke.

“It’s not something we put a fine point on, but there’s a moment that always has stuck with me since we shot the episode, which was the moment after Rebecca sticks out her tongue at Jack and walks out, and you just hang back and the way Milo played it, it’s almost as if he’d been covering a little bit, like that feeling when you know something’s a little off internally but you can’t quite process it,” Fogelman explained. “He doesn’t know he’s going to die one second later, but I do think that’s what he played. I think that comes across.”

In “Super Bowl Sunday,” we finally saw how the Pearson family house fire played out. After rescuing Rebecca, Randall and Kate, Jack ran back into the house to save Kate’s dog. That extra exposure to the flames and smoke weakened his heart. At first, it looked like he would make it, as he was all smiles when the doctor explained the side effects of his heroics. But moments later, he suffered a cardiac arrest. Jack’s funeral was featured in the following episode.

Since the show plays with time, Ventimiglia is not going anywhere. During the rest of the second season, we will learn more about Jack’s service in Vietnam and his brother, who died during the war.

Fogelman is confident that he will not lose his audience, now that the show’s central mystery is solved. People will still want to know about the Pearson family.

“We got concerned about it,” Fogelman told EW. “Honestly, I think it was a little bit of a BS story — the narrative that people were overwhelmed about the Jack mystery and death. It was almost like it was getting overwhelming because of how much people were writing about how people were getting overwhelmed by it.”

After all, there is still plenty of drama left in the present, where Kevin is struggling with an addiction to painkillers, Kate is trying to keep her relationship with Toby together after a miscarriage and Randall is renovating a building.

“There is a desire — and I even have it, to know what’s happening with every single character on the show, and every character is rich with this living of life and experiencing loss that it’s all part of it — to know about Kate and Kevin and Randall, as much as you want to know about Jack and Rebecca young, Jack and Rebecca in different stages, and Jack’s end,” Ventimiglia told EW. “They’re all equal.”

The next episode of This Is Us airs on Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC. The show was on hiatus for the Winter Olympics.

Photo credit: NBC