This Is Us stars reveal their most challenging scenes from season 4 to film

While you count down the days until the finally announced season 5 premiere of This is Us on Nov. 10, let's look back at a few pivotal moments from season 4. The most recent batch of episodes of NBC's time-tripping family drama significantly broadened the Pearson universe, fractured two-thirds of the Big Three, introduced all sorts of parenting hurdles, plunged one character into therapy and revealed a heartbreaking disease for another. Here, Sterling K. Brown (who is nominated for his fourth consecutive Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy) and his costars reveal the scenes and story lines that proved the most challenging for them to film. Warning: One of them involves a silicone doll.

Chris Sullivan (Toby)

After battling issues of depression, Kate's husband faced hurdles in connecting his blind son, Jack. It was a story line that resonated with several of Sullivan's friends. "One of the harder things for them to talk about — both the mothers and the fathers, not all of them, but a good, good number of them — [was] that lack of immediate connection to their child that they either thought was going to be there, or everyone told them was going to be there, the fantasy fairytale version of it dictated as such," he says. A harrowing-yet-bonding solo parenting moment with Jack in "The Cabin" proved the trickiest for Sullivan to film. "The Heimlich maneuver scene this last year was really far more traumatizing than I thought it would be," he shares. "Of course we had, we had little Wells [Barnes] there — our actual baby Jack — but we also had this silicone doll that we were using. Because you certainly can't pound your palm on the back of a real baby over and over again. And that scene really hit me. One, I thought logistically it was going to be really difficult and we managed to pull it off and make it very convincing. But two, just the emotional panic of the whole thing was hard."

Chrissy Metz (Kate)

When Toby seemed to be disconnected from his fatherly responsibilities, Kate was encouraged by her mother, Rebecca (Mandy Moore), to confront him. (Mother would know, having delivered that I-need-you-to-be-a-10 speech to Jack in the late-'80s.) That key scene in "A Hell of a Week, Part 3" tested both the character and the actress. "Anytime you push against something that you could potentially lose, it's scary," Metz says. "When she was pushing back and saying, 'This isn't enough for me and you've got to show up for our own son,' there was a chance he wasn't going to pull his own weight, and who knows. Because she has this idea in the back of her head that her father's not there, maybe another man will leave her as well. And whether it's self-induced or that she created or contributed to that, that is something that was really difficult to play it in a way that she was strong enough, but also trying to be sympathetic enough."

Metz also felt challenged by the story unspooling for Rebecca, who has been diagnosed with what is likely an early form of Alzheimer's. "I'm so grateful to play with Mandy and all of the unveiling of what Rebecca really is going through," she says. "And especially because as soon as they're starting to find their footing, as far as a mother-daughter goes in a positive way, she feels like she's losing her. So it was really difficult. A lot of people reached out and talked about similar experiences and it's hard. It's heartbreaking."

Justin Hartley (Kevin)

Hartley isn't keeping his most challenging season 4 scene a secret, but he is taking it to the grave. Specifically, Sophie's mother's grave. When the slowly maturing movie star reconnected with his childhood sweetheart/ex-wife, Sophie (Alexandra Breckenridge) in "A Hell of a Week, Part Two," he communed with the regrets he had about their relationship at the cemetery. "I had kind of an issue with myself when we were filming the scene where Kevin is kneeling down in front of his ex mother-in-law's grave and explaining all of his shortcomings and apologizing for what he did to her daughter," he shares. "And for mucking that up twice. For me, it was tough because I was having a problem just as an actor, as a person, holding it together. Because I didn't want it to be this blubbering mess. And I had a really great director and a really great crew behind me to help me through that."

Susan Kelechi Watson (Beth)

While Jack and Mr. Lawrence shared a most awkward meal in the past, the present day drama in "The Dinner and the Date" brought even more tension to the table. Randall and Beth invited the parents of Deja's (Lyric Ross) boyfriend, Malik (Asante Blackk), to their home, and soon found themselves at uncomfortable odds with Daryl (Omar Epps) and Kelly (Marsha Stephanie Blake). Watson recalls the work that she put into calibrating the reactions of Deja's adoptive, protective mother. "It's two families trying to protect their own," says Watson. "And it was hard for me because I was trying to figure out the balance. I didn't want it to tip into a street fight in the house. But this thing of like, 'Don't step over the line either.' So it was this delicate balance of like, 'How do I keep this as two parents fighting for their kids and not sort of, 'Okay, let's take this outside'? That was a tricky scene to try to navigate the balance of that. That was really well directed by Ken Olin, I have to say. I remember that day very clearly on set and he really steered the ship in all the right directions."

When things briefly dipped into a comedic direction — as Beth seeks refuge with some wine in the pantry — it turned into one of Watson's favorite moments of the season. "I personally love comedy and I love the rhythm of comedy, and that scene for me, I was able to find such a rhythm of comedy in that scene that felt so fun to play," she says. "And in midst of all of this, sometimes you get so riled up about something you don't even realize we do this in life that we're being funny, like you're being insane and it's funny. And I love that in the midst of all that drama, there were these moments of just she's still in this very passionate space, but there's all this comic relief, too. I love that scene."

Milo Ventimiglia (Jack)

Ventimiglia says that he had plenty to work with during Jack's struggle with Rebecca's father, Dave (Tim Matheson), but it was another shading of our preferred Pearson patriarch that presented an even bigger challenge. When Jack invites Randall's teacher, Cory Lawrence (Brandon Scott) to dinner in "The Dinner and the Date," a naive, threatened, and unsavory side of SuperDad is laid bare. "Jack want[s] to be the guiding light in Randall's life," he says. "But also having to accept there are a lot of... not shortcomings, just facts of life that Jack can't provide for Randall. I don't have many moments as Milo, the actor playing Jack, that I'm disagreeing with how he's playing a moment, but that was one of them. I'm like, 'Jack, don't be a jerk. Come on. What are you doing?' And a lot of that I think is Jack's insecurity. He has such a desire to be this father of their lives. But when he understands that he can't actually be everything for them, it's a really, really difficult thing for Jack to understand and to accept. So that was tough. There was a line that I think didn't make the cut, but it was Cory saying, 'You have to teach him how to be Randall. Randall's unique enough. It has nothing to do with the color of his skin. Let him be Randall.'"

Sterling K. Brown (Randall)

Randall struggled to allow himself to enter therapy, and then struggled some more once he sat down on the couch. It also was no walk in the park for the man who plays Randall to bring that to life, especially the theoretical exercise in "After the Fire" in which Dr. Leigh (Pamela Adlon) encouraged him to reveal his nightmare scenario if Jack hadn't perished in the fire. "Therapy was difficult on two levels because Randall was so guarded when he first initially went into the process and I've been doing therapy for a long time," says Brown. "So I had to remember what it was like when I first started sharing the most personal aspects of your life with someone who's a complete stranger and being comfortable with that. I want to say that Pamela was absolutely wonderful to play with. She does like Justin and I do, and Sully, where you have these heavy scenes to do and to cut the tension, you just make people laugh as hard as possible. But what was tough about it is that Randall is such an intensely feeling human being, that to a certain extent, he was cut off from his emotions as a way to preserve himself in that 2.0 version. Even in the depicting of it, I was like, 'Oh, people aren't going to like this.' Because there's a wall that he's put up between him and his family. And we're unaccustomed to seeing it. I can even remember [with] the box of William's belongings and just the idea that this box of stuff he has no personal connection to, and he dropped it in the trash. There's two things that happened to me simultaneously. There's me performing as the actor. And then there's me observing the actor as an audience member and as an audience member, I was like 'S---. Ooof.' So 2.0 was interesting."

Mandy Moore (Rebecca)

Season 4 delved deep into Rebecca Pearson, specifically her slow downward spiral into cognitive collapse. Among Moore's standout moments — and perhaps her biggest test — came in the "New York, New York, New York" episode, when Rebecca delivered a heartfelt speech to her bickering sons at the Met that she needed to maximize the coming years before her brain betrayed her. "They actually shut down the museum for us to be able to film," recalls Moore. "So you can imagine walking through the Met in New York City, pre-pandemic, right before the world shut down and having carte blanche to just meander around this empty monolith of a museum. I had to go into this four-and-a-half page monologue. I was sitting on the plane [to New York], just going over it and over it and over in my head. Usually memorization is not something that is too terribly difficult for me, but also knowing we only had a certain amount of time to film in the Met and that we were jumping right into it and then had to move on to other scenes, I felt that that pressure of trying to nail it…. Without getting emotional about it, it's like watching this woman come to terms with where her life is and this train that's coming that she's unable to stop — which is this diagnosis that she has — her finally taking ownership in the choices that she's making and her own life and her own happiness. It's so complicated."

That knotty mix of emotions roiled inside Moore during her New York adventure. But while she felt tremendous sorrow for her character, she says she worked hard to keep that sadness from leeching into her portrayal. "This sense of authority that she has when she tells Randall, 'I'm not going to do that clinical trial, I've made this choice for myself. When I picture the next few years of my life, I don't know what it looks like necessarily, but I know that I want to be surrounded by my family,' is really bold and brave," says Moore. "And I feel like it's a color we haven't necessarily seen of Rebecca, especially at this phase of her life. So all of that was just trying to get it right was something I was nervous about and really conscious of…. My grief as Mandy for Rebecca and the situation she finds herself in is immense. I can get emotional just thinking about it, what this path at this woman is about to venture down on with her family. But I have to keep that to myself. So it's like a really weird balance of: my heart is broken for her as Mandy, but I can't show that as Rebecca, because her heart is not broken. She is so stoic and so strong. There's such resolve in the choices that she's making and how she feels about her life at this point that I can't let that color anything."