‘This Is Us’: Justin Hartley Teases ‘Huge’ Jack And Vietnam Scenes For Season 3

This Is Us fans won’t be seeing less of Jack Pearson when the show’s third season kicks off this fall. Although the Pearson patriarch played by Milo Ventimiglia died during Season 2 of the NBC drama, there’s plenty more of Jack ‘s life story for the show to explore. In a new interview with The Wrap, This Is Us star Justin Hartley teased that the upcoming season could be the biggest one yet for Jack.

The second season of This Is Us ended with a montage that showed Hartley’s character, Kevin Pearson, headed to Vietnam with his new girlfriend, Zoe (Melanie Liburd). For Season 3, viewers will go along for the ride as Kevin searches for information about his late father’s past as a war veteran.

Hartley told The Wrap that, with just 36 episodes of This Is Us already aired, viewers have only been with Jack Pearson as an audience for 36 hours of his life, so there’s much more of his life story that hasn’t been revealed. The This Is Us star went on to explain.

“I mean, trust me, we could do a whole three seasons about one year of Jack’s life that we haven’t even seen yet. So I would not worry at all about seeing less of him. In fact, I think Season 3 is gonna be a huge season for that character.”

Hartley recently told Entertainment Tonight that Kevin will be “retracing his father’s footsteps” in Vietnam to “find clues and get information about things he doesn’t quite know about.”

The This Is Us star also revealed that Kevin’s trip to explore Jack’s past will pave the way for scenes that his adult character Kevin “has nothing to do with.” In other words, This Is Us viewers can expect to see Milo Ventimiglia in plenty of flashback scenes set in Vietnam before Jack started his life with wife Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and became a father to the Big Three (played as adults by Hartley, Chrissy Metz, and Sterling K. Brown).

This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman previously revealed that Season 3 of the show will be “a big Vietnam season,” telling Deadline, “Milo will get a real showcase as younger Jack and there will be more Jack and Rebecca origin stories.”

In addition, This Is Us executive producer Elizabeth Berger teased next season’s Jack-centric storylines.

“I think Season two was so much about Jack’s death obviously, and I think season three, in a really cool way, is going to be more about his life and sort of focusing on these chapters that we haven’t yet seen,” Berger said, according to E! News. “I think Jack has alluded to Rebecca that he has a lot of secrets and there are parts of his life that even she hasn’t been privy to, and we’re going to get to really explore those parts in a really exciting way.”

The This Is Us cast will begin shooting scenes for the third season of the show in about six weeks. You can see Justin Hartley talking about Season 3 of This Is Us in the interview below.

This Is Us returns to NBC this fall.