This Is Us may not be back for season two yet, but the tears don't have to wait.
Kristin Dos Santos caught up with the cast of NBC's hit on the red carpet at the show's FYC Emmys event in Los Angeles on Wednesday and had several of them crying as they reflected on the lessons the show has taught them, whether they're about parenting, marriage, or even just relating to other people.
"I had this conversation with [creator Dan Fogelman] after I watched the pilot, I said this show's gonna change people's lives. And I didn't know I was talking about me at the time," Justin Hartley says. "And then I realized after a while, no it's my life. This is really changing my life. It changes the way that I listen to my daughter and the way I respond to what she says, and I like to think I'm a better father because of the show."
"You do the best you can, or that you know how to in the moment, and then when you know better, you do better, so you have so much more compassion for your parents once you become a parent, because you realize like, oh, they could have messed up in so many more ways that they didn't even do," Sterling K. Brown says. "I should be thanking my stars that I turned out as well as I did."
Brown's on-screen wife, Susan Kelechi Watson, says the show has taught her about how important it is to be vulnerable.
"I think I've learned a little bit about vulnerability, that it's OK to sit in a vulnerable moment and be there with somebody in a vulnerable moment and just let it be that," she says. "It is what it is, it's an open wound, and we can sit here and be in it together."
Mandy Moore tells us that so far, the series has encouraged her to get closer to her friends and family.
"I think it's made all of us like sort of want to hug our loved ones a little closer, and maybe have like conversations with your friends and family that you would have never thought to have or you didn't feel comfortable to have," she says. "I think it's opening up this dialogue with people, because you're sort of forced to hold a mirror up to yourself, like what is my relationship with my siblings, or my parents, or on and on and on. It makes me feel closer to my family. It makes me want to keep in communication with everybody even more."
"It's about removing the ego and that nothing is personal and that we all are really trying to do the best we can with what we have, and some people are a little more evolved, and we're all teachers and students," Chrissy Metz explains. "It's just about evolving."
So it's official: this cast is just as good at tapping into our emotions off screen as they are on it. Is it September yet?!
This Is Us returns to Tuesdays on NBC this fall.
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBC Universal family.)