Chrissy Metz shares how playing Kate on ‘This Is Us’ helped her heal

Chrissy Metz is opening up about how playing Kate Pearson on This Is Us helped her heal her own childhood trauma after suffering mental, physical, and emotional abuse from her stepfather.

“What’s interesting is all the things I never heard, I get to hear from people,” Metz said during a visit to The Jamie Kern Lina Show to discuss how she’s been learning to feel worthy after not feeling that way while growing up. “So everyone’s like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry if I’m bothering you.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You’re healing the wounds for me. You’re putting little Band-Aids on these wounds for me.'”

“It really means a lot to me,” she continued, “It means a lot, because I feel like they have been impacted, and not because of me, but because of, yeah, what I’ve brought to the role, but also the way that it was written, the way that there was such care taken for her and for the show as a whole.”

Though she’s managed to come to terms with her stepfather’s treatment of her through therapy, Metz says that it still affects the way she walks into every room, leaving her to wonder, “Why does my weight equate my worthiness?“

“It was devastating,” Metz admitted. “I mean, it’s still something that I deal with, and even in any kind of relationship and any kind of job that I want, I’m like, ‘Am I worthy of this?’ It’s so much about, ‘Am I worthy of attention, affection, love?'”

Metz recalled a conversation she had with a woman who she did not expect to have anything in common with, a “cute little thing” in “her cute little workout clothes and her little stroller and her little baby. And she’s like, ‘Can I talk to you?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’ And I think she’s going to say something hateful or rude or whatever.”

Metz was then shocked when the woman told her, “I can’t tell you how much I relate to your character…. Just because I’m not overweight, just because I don’t have extra weight on my body, doesn’t mean that I don’t relate to the behaviors, or the unworthiness, or whatever the behavior is around food.”

An immensely popular network primetime family drama, when those were all but extinct, This Is Us introduced the Pearson clan, following the lives of siblings Kate, Kevin (Justin Hartley), and Randall (Sterling K. Brown) and their parents, Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore).

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The show ran from 2016 to 2022 and picked up a number of awards, including four Emmys and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, including back to back Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series trophies for Metz and the whole cast in 2018 and 2019.

Watch more of Metz’s interview below.