Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown and Chris Sullivan are revisiting a key scene from their late co-star Ron Cephas Jones that holds a new meaning now that Jones is gone.
On This Was Us, the podcast she co-hosts with her This Is Us co-stars where the three dive back into the world of the Pearsons to relive each episode and all the life lessons that came with it, Moore reflected on a scene where Jones’ character William Hill, the biological father of Brown’s Randall Pearson, is asked about his outlook on life while battling cancer.
“How does it feel to be dying?” he’s asked. Moore reads his answer from the script:
It feels like all these beautiful pieces of life are flying all around me and I’m trying to catch them. The pieces are moving faster now and I can’t catch them all. I can feel them slipping through my fingertips. I know it feels like you have all the time in the world, but you don’t. So stop playing it so cool. Catch the moments of your life, catch them while you’re young and quick because sooner than you know you’ll be old and slow and there will be no more of them to catch. And when a nice boy who adores you offers you pie, say thank you.
“You really get the sense that he had a profound understanding of what he was saying,” says Brown, who famously had tear-jerking scenes with his onscreen father as they reunited later-in-life on the series.
“I very viscerally remember it being a physically taxing exercise for Ron [to hike earlier in the episode] because he was suffering,” Moore then said. “It was really hard for him to breathe. And I remember that him sitting was scripted, but also because he genuinely needed to do that. It really brought home what was happening in real time in those moments while we were shooting this show and this season. You’re right that Ron just had this intrinsic connection to what his character was going through and it just makes it all the more poignant.”
After Moore shed that light on the private health struggles Jones was facing while acting out his character’s final days, Brown remarked that Jones’ monologue continued what the show had laid the groundwork for: “Wow, these are instructions on how to live.”
Though Jones’ William died early on in the series, he remained on the show in flashbacks and other spiritual moments — including in the poignant series finale — as the series famously time jumped throughout its run. On the series, William had Stage 4 stomach cancer that killed him.
In real life, after the show wrapped, Jones later died in August 2023 at age 66 from a long-standing pulmonary issue. In 2021, Jones had revealed that he received a double-lung transplant following a secret battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He said he spent nearly two months at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and credited his co-stars and producers for helping him get through filming. After filming his final scene as William for the series finale, he said on set, “You cats held me when I was struggling and you didn’t let me go. You’ve been there for a very difficult part of my life. I’m a walking miracle.”
Following his death, onscreen son Brown remarked on how “life imitated art today, and one of the most wonderful people the world has ever seen is no longer with us.” “@cephasjaz has passed away, and the world is a little less bright,” he wrote in a social media tribute.
When reflecting on the storyline risks that the show took over its record-breaking broadcast run, creator Dan Fogelman cited Jones’ character’s fate as one of their biggest swings.
“With this show, there was a little bit of that, ‘Oh, it’s network TV’ mentality.’ But we jumped eight years from the pilot in the second episode. Ron Cephas Jones became this beloved character — we killed him in the first season,” he recalled when speaking to The Hollywood Reporter with his main cast for their 100-episode milestone. “Jack was the patriarch of the family — we killed him in the second season. Those were all big choices.”
