Mandy Moore is excited, scared as new musical chapter begins

About 24 hours before Mandy Moore’s family drama “This is Us” aired its series finale on NBC, the actress was a jumble of emotions about how this one major ending in her life is giving way to a whole new chapter of beginnings. 

For six seasons, Moore has gained critical acclaim playing the family matriarch, Rebecca Pearson, on “This Is Us” over different ages and generations. With the show concluding this week, though, she’s set to resume her career as a musician and songwriter, kicking off her first major tour in over a decade to promote her album, “In Real Life.”

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“I feel really grateful to have the tour to process my feelings because I think I might be curled up in the fetal position in my house otherwise,” Moore, 38, told The News & Observer, the day after the series finale was screened for a VIP audience in Los Angeles.  “It’s very bittersweet, but I get to feel all of these feelings, and like put them on stage every day and not just kind of jump into another job,” she said. “Which I feel like I would have a lot of trouble with because I would just compare and contrast it to ‘This Is Us.’”  Yet, she acknowledges that separating her music from “This Is Us” isn’t so simple. The TV show influenced her desire to return to music, she said, and much has happened in her personal life since the series debuted in 2016 that has informed her songs. She married fellow musician Taylor Goldsmith of the group Dawes in 2018. They had their first son, a boy named Gus in 2021.

“I feel like ‘This Is Us’ opened up the idea of music back in my life again,” Moore said. “It put me back face-to-face with musicians. Literally being in the studio, and I just remember coming away from that going, I need this, I have to figure out how this is going to be a bigger part of my life again. It activated something in me.”  The studio album, “In Real Life,” which was released in May, is her first LP since she and Goldsmith had their son. It’s a follow-up to her March 2020 album, “Silver Landings,” which was Moore’s first album in more than a decade. 

She added, “It’s beautiful in its simplicity. It is sort of summarizing what the show has kind of been all along. I think it’ll be a gentle hug for people. It will leave people with a cheerful smile on their face. It’s kind of everything people have gravitated towards the show and loved about the show, just very simply put. It’s not a heavy-handed finale.  So much of this episode feels like a real flashback, like a time capsule. Because we filmed it four years ago. It’s really cool in that sense, because I didn’t know what it was.”

Tribune News Service