This Is Us hasn’t just been renewed for one more season, it’s been renewed for three more seasons. The critically-acclaimed show will have 6 seasons total, so the Pearson family’s story will be told in its entirety without fear of cancellation. HollywoodLife sat down EXCLUSIVELY with Sterling K. Brown about the amazing 3-season renewal. “I know that we get a chance to see this story through to its end,” Sterling told HollywoodLife. “I did a TV show before that got canceled unexpectedly, and we didn’t necessarily get a chance to see it through to completion, and that was kind of sad. But this story means a lot to me personally, and it means a lot to a lot of people. It sort of re-emphasizes this idea of community and that you’re not in it by yourself. We are regular people — the Pearsons — with regular problems. When other folks watch the show, they recognize themselves within one or all of us or recognize their struggles within one or all of us and there’s this moment of connection. I feel like we’re in a very disenfranchised part of reality in this country, in particular where people feel very separate and isolated. I think This Is Us reminds us that we’re not by ourselves, that the same things that we’re going through the Pearsons are going through, too. That just makes life just a little bit easier.”
Sterling has played Randall at different stages of his life. He opened up about what phases of Randall’s life he’d love to see more of in season 4. “We just got a chance to touch on early Beth and Randall, which I’m sort of fascinated by,” Sterling continued. “I don’t get a chance to do the earliest incarnation. I leave that to my man, Niles [Fitch]. But I love the dynamic between the young lady who plays Beth and between young Randall. As a fan, I look forward to seeing them in college more. I’m excited about what Philadelphia offers them as a couple and as individuals. Randall’s identity is so connected to his blackness and his sort of separation from the black community. Now that he gets to be a councilman in Philadelphia and service the black community in a very direct way, I think it’s an opportunity for him to really find himself in a way that he hasn’t in this point in time in his life. I’m looking forward to what’s next.”
In addition to This Is Us, his new movie Angry Birds 2, and his upcoming role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season 3, Sterling is working on a new project called Survivorship Today: What It’s Like to Live with Cancer. He explained why this was an important partnership for him. “My Uncle Sonny died in 2004,” Sterling said. “He was diagnosed with cancer and within six months he was no longer with us. It was a devastating event for my entire family. But today people are living longer with cancer than they did when my Uncle Sonny passed away. So the fact that we’re talking about living with cancer is a good thing. But survivorship doesn’t end when you’re declared cancer free. It can be the beginning of a whole new journey and what we’ve learned in partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb launching the Survivorship Today web series, and you can check it out at SurvivorshipToday.com, is that survivors, the way that they look, the way that they think, it’s hard to get back to the person that they were before their diagnosis. But there is a place that they can go through this website, through this series, to recognize a couple of things. There is a community of people that understand what they’ve endured, and there are testimonials and interviews of survivors that can speak to what it’s like to be a survivor right now and the things that they need to live their best life. There’s also a list of resources of different websites that you can go to for both psychological and physical help to live the fullest life possible given the fact that you are now living with cancer. So it’s just about that and finding a community of people that understand what you’ve gone through.”
Sterling has been able to talk to survivors one-on-one and he says the experience has been “really wonderful. The survivors that I’ve spoken to through the series, in particular, they’re all advocates, so they’re all trying to pay it forward. They’re making sure that the communities that they represent as individuals know that they don’t have to be by themselves, whether that’s a Chinese community, Chinese American, African American, whether it’s men in general. There’s a certain kind of machismo that men can have about trying to endure things on their own but you can share, you can cry, you can be supported with other men, and that support allows you to move forward in a way that wasn’t possible in solitude.”