Give Me Moore

She’s bagged the role of a lifetime, found her soulmate and discovered a second lease on life. This is the reinvention of Mandy Moore

MANDY MOORE THOUGHT HER CAREER WAS OVER. In early 2015 she’d completed filming yet another television pilot for a US network – a fourth straight, by her count – that again would not see the light of day.

Her personal life was a shambles; she was in the midst of a bitter divorce from indie rocker Ryan Adams and, after close to 20 years in the entertainment business, she was on the verge of chucking it all in and becoming a journalist like her mum or maybe even a blogger. Anything else.

“There was no forward momentum in any respect and it wasn’t just frustrating and daunting, I was questioning whether or not I was meant to be a performer anymore,” the 34-year-old actor and musician says from her mid-century home overlooking Los Angeles’ San Gabriel mountains.

“I think I got to a point where I just felt like the engine had been completely shut off on the machine. And I couldn’t find my way back to it and I couldn’t start it up again.”

A new agent made a final effort to get her to read yet another pilot script (“I’d said I didn’t want to look at another one”) and she flipped the first page more out of courtesy than anything else.

That script was This Is Us and, three years later, the massively popular weepy TV romcom drama is garnering Moore critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination for her role as matriarch Rebecca Pearson, in which she ages from her 20s to her 60s.

“You wait an entire lifetime, an entire career for something like this,” Moore enthuses. “You just appreciate it and savour every moment. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.”