After years of avoiding Milo Ventimiglia’s acting projects, his wife, Jarah Mariano, recently began This Is Us.
“So my wife, she just finally started watching it,” Ventimiglia, 47, quipped during the Tuesday, October 15, episode of Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown and Chris Sullivan’s “That Was Us” podcast. “She’s barely ever seen anything I’ve ever really done. I appreciate it, like, now, but there’s a few things I’m like, ‘This is actually funny.”
Ventimiglia, who starred as patriarch Jack Pearson on This Is Us, revealed that his 39-year-old spouse “decided to turn it on when [he] was away from the house” while she was eating a meal alone. After one episode — the show originally aired between 2016 and 2022 — Mariano was hooked.
“I’ll pop into the room and I’m like, ‘Oh, s—,” Ventimiglia recalled. “She just got past the Super Bowl episode.”
Ventimiglia’s costars, meanwhile, wanted to know how Mariano was coping with the heavy emotional scenes.
“She can separate Jack from me, but she’s just a f—ing crier,” he said with a laugh. “It’s one of those things. She’s just crying and taking it in. I’m not badgering her; I’m not asking her, ‘Hey, so tell me about this character, this scene, tell me stuff.’ I’m waiting for her to want to talk to me about it.”
Ventimiglia added, “Also, in a strange way, it still feels, to me, so close and so recent. Like, I’ll walk in and be like, ‘Mhm, I gotta go.’ I walk out [but] sometimes I’ll linger because I remember watching this and this was a beautiful moment, just, for myself and my own enjoyment, but I can’t watch it just yet.”
Ventimiglia and Mariano were first linked in 2022, one year before Us Weekly exclusively confirmed in October 2023 they secretly wed in an intimate ceremony.
“Last year I married my best friend,” Mariano gushed via Instagram last month. “There aren’t enough words that exist to describe all the special qualities that make him who he is. All I can say is that I am grateful for the life that we have together and the happiness that we have created🤍 Aloha wau iā ‘oe my husband Milo.”
Ventimiglia, however, still isn’t sure whether playing Jack on This Is Us impacted his marriage.
“I feel like I need to analyze moments I’ve had with my wife to see if there was any crossover,” he quipped on Tuesday. “I think also Jack and Rebecca had a very specific time-period relationship.”
Mariano confirmed in September that she is pregnant with the couple’s first baby.