‘This Is Us’ Season 4 Episode 2 Recap: Should We Be Concerned About Kate?
As for baby Jack, it's so important that an actor (Blake Stadnik) who is legally blind in real life was cast to play the adult version of Kate and Toby's son. Will you cast a toddler who is blind for when Jack gets a little older?
That’s a great question. That’s something that’s a bit of a ways out, so we haven’t totally gotten into it yet. The challenges of finding babies who are able to work is high already; to add on the criteria that it also be a blind infant was just impossible for us, but it was always important for us to accurately represent these conditions and do our best to hire the appropriate actors. We certainly have more storylines [that focus on Jack's blindness] coming up, and we always try to do our best.
Let’s talk about preteen Kate for a moment and the scenes at the pool. It was heartbreaking when she thought she was meeting Cliff, but it was actually Stuart, even though she turned it into a sweet moment. Will we see more of him?
Yeah, we’re telling much more complicated middle school Wonder Years–y stories for our big three this season, and they're a bit more serialized because they’re more complicated. Kate reeling from that first kiss is definitely something we’re going to carry forward this season.
NBC/Ron Batzdorff
It’s wild to see how much the kids have grown since season one, but now you have these great flashbacks you can use. And in this episode we finally saw the kid version of the big three.
We have lots in store for them, the little little big three, as I call them. They are the sweetest, cutest kids. Everyone is just so happy when they’re on set. They’re actually all much better at speaking than I thought given how young they are, so we can give them real lines. We're always excited to have new parts of Jack and Rebecca’s life to dive into, and that’s one we really haven’t touched. We’ve done pregnant Rebecca, and we’ve done Jack and Rebecca as parents to eight- and nine-year-olds, but we haven’t seen anything in between. We’re excited about all the possibilities there.
