Remember when Jack Pearson reentered a burning house to fetch his daughter’s dog and several family mementos and ended up dying as a result of it? Yeah, “This Is Us” star Milo Ventimiglia remembers it too, only those memories of filming the heartbreaking Season 2 episode are intertwined with lovely ones of making a rom-com with Jennifer Lopez.
Ventimiglia told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Tuesday that he had a blast while shooting “Second Act” with JLo (sorry, Mandy Moore) even though he was filming the project while “burning down the Pearson house.”
“I had met Jennifer a couple times by way of NBC; her TV show, my TV show,” Ventimiglia said. “I got a phone call that said, ‘Hey, Jen’s doing this movie and she really wants you. And she doesn’t want anybody else. She wants you.’ So I was like, okay! I was literally fighting my schedule on the show to find a handful of days that I could fly back to the East Coast, because we filmed in New York.”
“Once I finally landed on set, she’s the coolest, most hard-working, most naturally gifted partner out there,” he continued. “We enjoyed ourselves. It was really fun. I filmed over the course of a month and I kind of went back and forth from L.A. to New York when I could between the show. While I was burning down the Pearson house, I was also arm-in-arm with Jennifer.”
“This Is Us” Season 3 premieres Tuesday, Sept. 25 at 9/8c on NBC.