It’s hard to imagine a world in which Milo Ventimiglia doesn’t play our beloved Jack Pearson on This Is Us. However, it turns out that was almost the reality of the situation before a certain actor missed his audition.
Apparently, Oliver Hudson—Kate Hudson’s brother and star of ABC's Splitting Up Together—read for the part of the patriarch of the NBC family drama, and as a result, was invited to do a chemistry read (or test) with Mandy Moore.
“So I went in and read, and it went very well, and they wanted me to come and do a chemistry read with Mandy Moore,” Hudson said on a 2018 episode of The Ladygang podcast. “But this will tell you how much I love to fish. I had a 10-day fishing trip planned. It's my life! Fishing is a big part of my life and it was this 10-day fishing trip and my agent says, ‘We have to test, and they really like you, and this, this, and that.' And I said, ‘Oh. I'm supposed to go on a fishing trip'… And he's like, ‘Ok, yea…so? I mean this is a big thing.' And I said, ‘You know what? I'm going to do my fishing trip, so…’” Honestly, we can’t believe it.
In his defense, there was no real way of knowing how big the NBC series would actually turn out to be. He continued, “Of course, it premiered massive and I'm like, 'Oh, sh*t.’ But I read the script and I rarely like anything, because there's a lot of sh*t, but I read it and was like, 'This is really good.' I thought it was very well written and new and a little different, interesting.”