'This is Us' Star Teases Romance, Marriage in Final Season

In typical This Is Us fashion, the season five finale left the Pearson family in some intensely emotional places. Although Kevin (Justin Hartley) and Madison (Caitlin Thompson) don't go through with their wedding, a flashforward to another wedding -- Kate (Chrissy Metz) and Phillip's (Chris Geere) -- hints at possible romance for Kevin in the future. According to Hartley, it's going to be quite a romantic journey for the final season of the NBC romantic drama.

"I was told a couple of different things," Hartley told TV Line about the Kevin and Madison breakup. "I was told that she leaves me at the altar at one point. I think there were different versions of this end result that was eventually going to happen anyway, inevitably. I think when people sort of started to think about it, the way that it actually went down was beautiful. It was so amazing how, you have this couple who's struggling to figure out how to love for so long because they're in a situation where they have these babies together, and Kevin wants what he wants and she wants. They spend all of this time trying to force this square peg into this round hole, and they like each other. But they're not meant to be together. Then the one moment that they actually are totally and completely honest with each other is the moment of the breakup. It's an incredible love story."

While the upcoming season will feature Kevin taking up his father Jack's (Milo Ventimiglia) quest to build a log cabin for his mother Rebecca (Mandy Moore), that doesn't mean that romance is off the table according to the flashforward, which features a married Kevin. "Yeah, I think we'll be revisiting it for sure. I think it's one of those things that we do tease certain things on our show, but it's not a shtick. It's for storytelling purposes. We absolutely will go back. There was one point where Kevin said, I'm a 45-year-old man. I can handle myself. You figure, okay, so that's five years in the future." As to who the wife is, Hartley knows. "Yeah. There's a plan. There's definitely a plan."

While This Is Us can be an emotional rollercoaster, showrunner Dan Fogelman told The Hollywood Reporter that everything would be tied up in the series finale. "All of those timelines are going to be brought to completion and explained," he assured readers. "There will be no looming questions when we get though the end of next season. Everything will be resolved... You can't always claim that 100 percent of your audience is going to like every single decision you make for the characters, but I don't think anything will be left on the table."