The Kid Actors On ‘This Is Us’ Don’t Get Enough Love… And That’s A Shame

This memory from my time in entertainment journalism has stuck with me for years: When I used to attend the TCA press tour, we’d go en masse onto the set of some show, look around, take pictures and talk to the talent. This time, we were touring the set of Modern Family. It was either in 2010 or 2012, but definitely within its first few years, when it was a certified hit and winning Emmys left and right.

We all mobbed the various adult stars of the show, shoving our recorders in their faces to ask about upcoming episodes or whatever came to our minds. And at the kitchen table of one of the sets (the Dunphy house, maybe?) sat Rico Rodriguez, Nolan Gould, Sarah Hyland and Ariel Winter, talking among themselves.

That’s right: The now-adult actors who played the Dunphy and Pritchett kids, who are now Instagram darlings or otherwise forging their own identities, were largely ignored by reporters in favor of the “big names.” It didn’t even occur to me to interview them until one of my colleagues sat down and talked to them as a group.

My thought at the time was that the kids were just as legitimately part of the cast as the adults; why aren’t they getting any attention? The same notion popped in my brain this morning, when I read in a Page Six item that the three actors who play the teen versions of the “Big 3” on This Is Us — Niles Fitch, Logan Shroyer and Hannah Zeile — are ineligible for the SAG Award for best cast because they haven’t garnered quite enough screen time, as have the trio who play the ten-year-old versions of Kate (Mackenzie Hancsicsak), Kevin (Parker Bates) and Randall (Lonnie Chavis).

We know a lot about the adult cast of This Is Us by now, whether it was the already-famous famous ones like Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia, the adult Big 3 of Justin Hartley, Sterling K. Brown and Chrissy Metz, or even the folks in the “wives and husbands” category like Susan Kelechi Watson and Chris Sullivan. They were on magazine covers; they have all sat in chairs next to talk show hosts; Annie Leibovitz shot them for this season’s promotional photos.

But do you know anything about the sextet of actors playing the kids? Probably not. And that’s a shame.

All six of them are regular cast members of one of the biggest shows on television; they’re not guest stars. And all six carry as much of their characters’ emotional baggage as their adults counterparts do.

Whose heart didn’t break this season when we saw Fitch as teen Randall ream out Rebecca (Moore) for not being there for the kids in the wake of Jack’s (Ventimiglia) death? How many times have you wanted to just hug teen Kate (Zeile), who made an effort through high school to keep her weight down, just throw all of her efforts away because it seemed that the only person who supported her was gone? And we felt the aimlessness that teen Kevin (Shroyer) felt after Jack died much more acutely than the aimlessness that adult Kevin (Hartley) had; only in Season 3, with adult Kevin’s quest to find out what Jack did in Vietnam, does he seem to have a purpose.

The performances of all six have been evocative and emotional; the trio playing the pre-teen Big 3 have been especially impressive, given the fact that kid actors who can play real humans are few and far between. But no one seems to be paying any attention to these performances; the six actors are never considered for awards and there’s very little press about them.

Even Dan Fogelman and the rest of his writing staff seem to be giving them the short end of the stick; the Page Six piece mentions that in some cases, only a few more minutes of screen time would have made the actors who play the teen versions of the Big 3 (two of whom, Zeile and Shroyer, are over 18, by the way) eligible for the SAG cast award. And since they weren’t considered for individual awards, not all  of them got invites to last year’s SAG Awards ceremony. The adult cast extended them their plus-ones so they could attend, and Ventimiglia had replica awards made so the kids could share in their best cast award last year, so at least it looks like their fellow castmembers have their backs.

But it shouldn’t be that way. Just like the kids from Modern Family should have shared in their show’s early success, the kids from This Is Us should be rewarded for their significant contributions to one of the only network shows not on CBS that anyone cares about. Just because they’re kids (and again: some of them aren’t kids anymore!) doesn’t mean they’re not great actors.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

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