From Acting To Directing - Milo Ventimiglia on Going Behind The Camera for 'This Is Us'

If your favorite character in This Is Us isn't Jack Pearson, then I am certain that almost everyone out there who has seen the show has judged you already. Portrayed amazingly by actor Milo Ventimiglia, it is the character of Jack Pearson that binds the tearjerker This Is Us and indeed gives you the maximum cries pretty much every scene he is involved in.

For the actor though, he went on to explore a new facet for the latest episode of the show's fourth season. Not entirely new though. Ventimiglia directed the fifth installment of Season four of the show called Storybook Love which went on-air on Tuesday. In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter, he talked about the process of directing marking his directorial debut amongst everything else.

Starting off with saying how, when he got the script, his first thought was that 'it's a lot to do in eight days.' He said, "It turned into, 'How do I shoot this efficiently and how do I shoot this in a way that, through fresh eyes of a different director, still feels like a great episode of a show that is four years deep into production?'"

Interestingly, this isn't the first time Ventimiglia has gone behind the camera where he's taken care of commercial work for the former WB network and several web series. "A lot of stuff that I've done was in the digital space. For me, as much as I'd always loved directing, I also loved giving a director a job, not having to shoulder a project myself. So I kind of geared a little more, actually a lot more, toward producing — putting crews together as opposed to leading a crew. The desire was always there to direct but as a producer I felt more compelled to hire someone to do a job as opposed to take that job for myself," Ventimiglia explained.

After 24 years of acting and 15 years of producing, "I don't imagine myself doing anything different than what I've been doing now," he said. "I think it's a natural transition for actors when you are exposed to great writers, great directors and actors and executives and everything. You just want to put projects and people together and you want to do things, hopefully, that audiences are going to like and love. So I would just imagine moving forward and doing more of the same of what I've already been doing for years at a lot of different levels."

This Is Us has affected Ventimiglia's career in so many ways — particularly in the way it has heightened his profile in Hollywood — but it also has made him even more passionate about his work.

"I think it puts my name in people's thoughts a little bit more because we happen to currently be on TV and that's the cycle of Hollywood. You're driving down the road and you see a billboard with someone's face on it and you're going to be reminded of that person. So if you drive down the street, you see an Art of Racing in the Rain billboard or a This Is Us billboard, [you think] 'Oh, yeah, there's that guy Milo Ventimiglia.' So I think that helps," he said. "But at the same time you have to do the work. As a producer, you've got to make sure you're aligning with the right writers, you've got to make sure you're aligning with the right material to take out to market."