Spoiler alert: The following story contains plot developments from Tuesday night’s episode of “This Is Us.”
Sterling K. Brown is living in a state of grace. He not only won an Emmy in September for playing Christopher Darden on “The People v. OJ Simpson,” bu❀t landed a key ✨role on the season’s most talked-about new series, NBC’s “This Is Us.” As Randall Pearson, the adopted child of two white parents, Brown went on a journey into his character’s past that was brave and uncomfortable, painful and, finally, liberating.
“To have two shows that have resonated with the critics and the public is surreal,” Bro💝wn tells The Post from the Vancouver set of his hiatus project, the movie “The Predator.” What’s different about “This Is Us,” he says, is ꧑“the way it cracks people’s hearts open and forces them to feel and reconnect.”
It’s very likely that some of those hearts broke after Tuesday night’s episode, in which Randall and his terminally ill biological father, William Hill (Ron Cephas Jones), embarked on a journey to Memphis so William could visit his old stomping grounds before it was too late. Each man sees the trip difꦿferently, Brown reveals.
“Randall has had an anxiety attack and is 🥃taking time off from work to clear his head. He knows his t⛄ime with his father is limited,” says Brown, 40. “I think he’s put on some blinders [and] holding out hope on treatment. He doesn’t know it’s William’s last trip.”
Sterling K. Brown says what’s different about ‘This Is Us’ is ‘the way it cracks people’s hearts open and forces them to feel and reconnect.’
In keeping with the show’s structure, the episode includes flashbacks of William’s youth. We see the younger William (Jermel Nakia) playing in a bar band with his cousin Ricky (Brian Tyree Henry of “Atlanta”), caring for his mother, Dorothy (Amanda Warren), and meeting a future girlfriend (Jennifer Holmes) on the bus. Switching back to pres💖ent day, an abashed Randall knocks on the door of the house where his father grew up and asks the present owners if William can have a look around. Once inside, Williams pulls a brick out of the fireplace and retrieves toys he placed there as a child. After William is gone, Randall drives home with the father’s toy truck on the dashboard.
Not a dry eye in the house.
For Brown, filming the scenes was demanding but their sequence tested his mettle, as he went from filming Randall’s breakdown at t𓃲he end of Episode 15 to William’s death at the🎃 end of Episode 16.
“Both of them were so emotional and heavy,” he says. “Ken Olin was direct🎉ing 15. Randall was in the corner [shaking]. We kept doing the scene over and over and I said, ‘Dude,🦂 I don’t know if I can do this anymore.’ He said, ‘Do what you can. I just want to go in from a different angle.’ So we did it a few more times. I didn’t know the next day was going to be the hardest scene of [Episode 16]. I didn’t want to shoot it. I didn’t want to say goodbye to Ron. It was apropos because Randall doesn’t want to say goodbye to his father.”
Thei💟r final scene, in which Randall holds the dying William’s head — as his adoptive father did for him as a boy when he was panicking — may be the show’s finest moment. “[Executive producer] Dan Fogelman took something that Milo (Ventimiglia) did [in Episode] 109 and used it,” Brown says. “It was just beautiful.”
With the March 14 Season 1 finale only weeks way, where does Randall go from here? “He has to figure out, ‘How do I honor my father’s legacy?,’” Brown says. “‘What is it that t🦄his man came into the ꦗworld to teach me?’”