Sterling K. Brown found the parallels between his life and his art difficult to weather.

The This Is Us actor, 50, opened up about his experiences filming the later episodes of the beloved series during the latest episode of the That Was Us rewatch podcast. As the Big Three weathered Rebecca Pearson’s life with Alzheimer’s, Brown was navigating his mom, Aralean, and her health needs while living with ALS.

“My mom has ALS, and there’s a point in time while we were shooting the show, and I remember going into the writers’ room and saying, ‘I don’t know which of my moms will pass away first,’ between my mom versus my TV mom,” Brown shared.

“And a lot of strange parallels were happening between Randall and myself,” he continued, using fights with siblings over the best handling of different matters.

Brown explained that he and his siblings work to figure out how to “honor her wishes” as Aralean is unable to speak since a few months after her 2018 diagnosis. Though they’ve found ways to communicate, he noted they have to recenter themselves on doing what she thinks is best for herself, because “her mind is still present.”

“And if it takes us a bit longer to get the information, then it takes us a little bit longer. But making sure each step of the journey, we are honoring what she wants.”

Brown previously spoke about his mom in a 2024 interview with NPR, talking about how having an “extraordinary human being” as his mother impacted his life, and his perspective on the storylines in This Is Us.

Giving background on his family, he explained that Aralean’s younger sister was fostering a baby when she “went missing for a period of two weeks” amid substance abuse struggles.

“She had dropped my little brother off at my mom’s house. And my mom called the social worker after a day and said, ‘Listen, I want you to know this little boy is here with me.’ The social worker came to the house and said, ‘Are you OK to keep him?’ And my mom said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ So then my mom became the foster parent for my little brother Robert,” he explains.

“Then the birth mother for Robert, who was dealing with substance issues herself, was pregnant with twins, my little sister Ariel and my little sister Avery. And the social worker said, ‘Would you be willing to take on these twins as well?’ And my mom said yes.”

Brown noted that Avery died of SIDS, which was a heartbreaking blow for the family, but Aralean pushed through and the family went on to formally adopt both Robert and Ariel.

“I have quite a mom. I have to say that, too. She’s an extraordinary human being,” he shared, then explaining her life with ALS. “I think she has far exceeded the expectations of most doctors in terms of lifespan, because she’s still with us. But the joy that my mom is able to hold on to, in the midst of this incredibly debilitating disease, the smile that she still has for the people who walk into her sphere is radiant.”

“It shows you, shows me, that first of all, I don’t have to allow circumstances to dictate how I am in the world, that I still have choice. I may not have choice over what my – what the circumstances are but how I respond to them. And my mom has been a shining example of how to maintain radiance in the midst of a very difficult situation,” he concluded.