The This Is Us cast took a trip to the Pearson family cabin, but it wasn’t for a rugged day outdoors. The stars of the NBC drama sat down for a photo shoot with renowned portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz.
The celebrity photographer joined This Is Us stars Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown, Chrissy Metz, Justin Hartley, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Chris Sullivan for the shoot which will be used for marketing materials for the hit NBC drama’s third season, Variety reports.
Leibovitz, who is known for her iconic portraits of everyone from John Lennon to Mark Zuckerberg, hasn’t photographed for a TV series in 13 years—not since she shot the cast of The Sopranos in 2005—but she is a superfan of This Is Us .
Moore, who plays matriarch Rebecca Pearson on the show, called the shoot “a bucket list thing, for sure,” adding, “It’s pretty humbling to think she’s watched every episode of our show.”
The This Is Us star told People she was surprised by how much Leibovitz knew about the show.
“We talked a lot about our particular characters, and I’ve never really quite done a photo shoot before, even when we’re supposed to be in character, where we really take that into consideration as much as this shoot. I felt this sort of bittersweet, dream-like quality that this particular shoot employed because Mom and Dad are with their grown children in different eras. It was sort of a bucket list thing, that’s for sure.”
The shoot also marked a rare appearance by Ventimiglia’s Jack Pearson alongside the adult versions of The Big Three (played by Justin Hartley, Sterling K. Brown, and Chrissy Metz).
Behind the scenes of the #ThisIsUs cast’s photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz: https://t.co/CifhgnzHIT pic.twitter.com/YUBrhk8ily
— Variety (@Variety) August 23, 2018
This Is Us fans are familiar with the Pearson family cabin, which has been shown in both flashback and present-day scenes in the show’s first two seasons.
In Season 1, an entire episode was devoted to the cabin when the adult Big Three made a road trip to their childhood haunt, where Randall (Brown) was haunted by a hallucination of his deceased dad standing on a ladder repairing the cabin’s roof.
A flashback episode also showed the young, 1980s-era Pearson family as they spent a rainy weekend at the cabin, complete with a trip to the ice cream parlor that Jack and his 10-year-old daughter Kate (Mackenzie Hancisak) frequented to get their favorite banana pudding ice cream. And then, of course, Kate’s (Metz) wedding to Toby (Sullivan) took place at the cabin during the Season 3 finale—although the quaint ice cream parlor was replaced with Artisanal Scoops, a new age eatery that featured freaky flavors.
Now, with the new photos by Annie Leibovitz, This Is Us fans will see the Pearson family cabin as they never have before.
This Is Us returns to NBC on Tuesday, Sept. 25.
