Chris Sullivan on Kate and Toby's 'This Is Us' divorce: 'I don't know timelines'

This Is Us has a lot of storylines, occurring on a lot of different timelines, to wrap up during its upcoming sixth and final season beginning next year.

The Season 5 finale, which aired in late May, revealed that beloved couple Kate Pearson (Chrissy Metz) and Toby Damon (Chris Sullivan) will get divorced at some point after the season previously explored hiccups in their marriage: Toby losing his job, Kate loving her new job, Toby getting offered a job in San Francisco and more. More controversially, the finale showed a scene from the future from Kate's wedding to (presumably) Phillip (Chris Geere).

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Sullivan couldn't disclose when the heartbreaking split will happen ("I don't know timelines"), but he did comment on the nature of that has led Kate and Toby to the breaking point:

"The position that Toby and Kate are in is not unusual for people. So it does intrigue me to see how [creator] Dan [Fogelman] and the writers try to navigate this, because it will be information for the audience. It will be helpful. It will be enlightening. It will be maybe information that they can use in their own life on how to navigate something like this. Or not navigate something like this. Sometimes having the information you need means that things don't work out—and that's just the way it goes sometimes.

"What's scary for people is not that things go bad and relationships end. I think what is scary for people is that you can actually love someone with all of your heart and it still doesn't work out. One of the important things to learn about navigating the ending of a relationship is that a lot of people will sabotage a relationship over a long period of time in order to feel comfortable ending it, instead of just saying, 'I love you. And that's why I can't do this anymore.'"

Metz previously discussed the shocking development: