This Is Us season 3: Why Michael Angarano is not playing Older Nicky

This Is Us January 29, 2019

On this past episode of This Is Us entitled “Songbird Lane: Part One,” you saw the first appearance of Griffin Dunne as Older Nicky. He did an excellent job, but the casting did somewhat break the show’s traditional form.

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As most longtime viewers know, the NBC series has a habit of having the same actors play the older versions of themselves. For example, Mandy Moore plays both the young adult, adult, and older versions of Rebecca. Meanwhile, we’ve seen Milo Ventimiglia wear old-age makeup for a dream sequence and Sterling K. Brown did it for a flash-forward. Why not have Michael Angarano do the same thing for Nicky?

As it turns out, there is a rather specific reason for it. As executive producer Isaac Aptaker explains to Entertainment Weekly, the youthful appearance of the 31-year old Angarano made it too difficult to age the character up for some of these scenes later on in this character’s life:

“Mandy is such a chameleon. We’re always amazed [at] what our hair and makeup department are able to do with her. Michael is an incredible actor, and I thought he gave an amazing performance when he’s playing Nicky in his 40s. But at a certain point, he has such a baby face, it just breaks, and hair and makeup can only do so much. We didn’t want it to feel like kids playing old characters in a high school play.”

With that in mind, it made sense to bring in Dunne, who is doing a great job tackling the older version of Nicky. The most important thing here is that it wasn’t distracting seeing someone else in this role; it felt like the same character and that’s what is important.

Ultimately, we think that This Is Us would like to use the same actor for its characters whenever it can, but there are just times when doing this is a little too much of a challenge for even them to pull off. The same goes for having some older actors and trying to age them young — they weren’t able to do that for Ron Cephas Jones (who plays William), so they brought in an actor to play a younger version of that role and it worked out great.

Do you think that casting an older version of Nicky on This Is Us was the right move? Be sure to share right now in the comments! (Photo: NBC.)

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