This Is Us star Chrissy Metz has a little-known link to Sheffield – and here’s the story behind it

The family saga This Is Us is one of America’s most popular TV dramas, regularly winning awards for the production and the actors’ performances.
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The show – available to watch in the UK via Amazon Prime Video – follows the lives of the Pearson family with a tale that spans decades.

Switching between the present day and the past, the main characters are parents Jack and Rebecca, their biological children Kevin and Kate – two surviving members of a triplet pregnancy – and their adopted son Randall.

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Now in its fifth season, the series stars Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore as Jack and Rebecca, Sterling K. Brown as Randall and Justin Hartley as Kevin, with Chrissy Metz taking the role of Kate in her breakthrough acting part.

Chrissy Metz in Hollywood in 2019. (Photo by Rachel Luna/Getty Images)Chrissy Metz in Hollywood in 2019. (Photo by Rachel Luna/Getty Images)
Chrissy Metz in Hollywood in 2019. (Photo by Rachel Luna/Getty Images)

And Metz, it’s emerged, has a link to Sheffield

When she was in her mid-20s, she met the man who would become her husband, British screenwriter Martyn Eaden, via an online dating site which she joined in 2006.

At the time, Eaden was living in Sheffield and Metz lived in Los Angeles, but the pair struck up a connection straight away and exchanged emails for months before meeting for the first time in the USA.

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Chrissy Metz in Beverly Hills in 2019. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)Chrissy Metz in Beverly Hills in 2019. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Chrissy Metz in Beverly Hills in 2019. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

A year into the relationship, Eaden proposed and the couple married in 2008 in a small ceremony in Santa Barbara, California.

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But in her 2018 memoir This Is Me: Loving The Person You Are Today she explained that the marriage fell apart and they decided to split, finalising their divorce in 2015.

“We're just not the right fit,” Metz wrote. “But I love him, and I'm always checking in on him. I am still working on being a better ex-wife than I was a wife.”

Metz, aged 40, is now in a relationship with Bradley Collins. In January, Metz told radio station SiriusXM that she met Collins on dating app Bumble and that he worked in music publishing.

“Bradley and I have all the same friends,” she said. “I feel like it was meant to be, for sure.”

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Metz is also a singer – in 2020 she signed a record deal with Universal Music Group Nashville and made her first appearance at the country scene’s famous Grand Ole Opry.

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