Milo Ventimiglia was the first person to ever swear at Mandy Moore.
The actor got along very well with his “lovely” “This Is Us” co-star, but he said on a podcast Tuesday that things once got “heated” when they were having an argument in character as couple Jack and Rebecca Pearson and got so caught up in the moment that they went off-script and ended up cursing at each other.
Speaking on “This Was Us,” Ventimiglia, 47, said: “So I’ll just start by saying, of course, Mandy Moore is one of the kindest human beings. She is who you all see her to be. Lovely, kind, beautiful, wonderful. Mandy Moore has never been cursed at in her life.”
Moore, 40, laughed, “Yeah, no one’s said ‘f–k you’ to me.”
Ventimiglia continued, “In the middle of a take, things were kind of going in a direction. I think I, as Jack, was feeling it. I was a little defensive.
“I think you might have dropped an F-bomb, then at one point in this back-and-forth at the very end of this chasing around, I was just like, ‘F–k you!’
“And I kind of had started to look away, but Mandy had literally [put her] her finger under my chin and pulled my face back. … You said, ‘Look me in the f–king face!”
Moore admitted, “It got hot. It got a little heated. Listen, sometimes you just have to go there.”
The scenes ultimately ended up being cut due to the program’s restrictions on swearing, but Ventimiglia admitted the take was “incredible” and he still has the footage somewhere.
The actress previously admitted she doesn’t think she’ll ever share a connection with another co-star like the one she had with Ventimiglia.
She told Variety, “It was effortless from the beginning, and it was effortless through the end. I acknowledge that I will never, ever have an on-screen partner like Milo again. It’s so rare to connect with someone on that level. In every way, this job was once in a lifetime.”
During their final scenes in the show, Ventimiglia smuggled tissues onto set to blot his co-star’s tears, and the pair had to use breaks in filming to move props around to hide the signs of Moore’s emotion.
She said: “Sweet Milo had a tissue ball underneath the pillow for me.
“Each take, Milo would very gingerly help me flip the pillow over so you didn’t see the tear stains. We were just trying to configure the pillow every take to make sure you couldn’t see where Mandy had been crying!
“He’d hand me my little wad of tissues to sop up the tears. It was so indicative of our relationship and the way we always supported each other and had each other’s back.”