This Is Us ended three years ago, but one of the show’s leading men, Sterling K. Brown, is still warming hearts.

Kelly Clarkson asked Brown, who played Randall Pearson on the NBC drama, about having changed his name as a teenager on Monday’s episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show.

“I went by my middle name, I went by ‘Kelby’ until I was 16 years old,” he answered. “My dad’s Sterling Brown Jr. My grandfather Sterling Brown Sr. I’m Sterling Kelby Brown.”

Brown said he simply wanted his own identity.

“I wanted my own name, and it felt like Sterling was like an old man’s name,” the Paradise star told Clarkson. “But because he passed away when I was 10, by the time I turned 16 and I hadn’t heard his name for five-and-a-half years, I was like, I kind of just want to hear that name again, so I asked people to call me Sterling.”

Both Brown and Clarkson were visibly emotional, with her saying, “That was so sweet and beautiful.”

See their exchange below.

Brown told EW last month that, of all the episodes in his heartwarming — and heartbreaking — family show, there’s one that people most want to talk to him about.

“‘Memphis,’ which is episode 116, when William (Ron Cephas Jones) passes away,” said Brown, whose Randall has always known he is adopted, but discovers over the course of the series that William is his biological father. “That one hits hard right, in the feels.”

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Brown noted that he and his former costars Mandy Moore (Rebecca) and Chris Sullivan (Toby) were about to discuss in their rewatch podcast the episode in which family patriarch Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) dies a tragic death.

“Different episodes hit different people in different ways,” Brown said. “And you have people come up to you all the time, and really what I get asked for more than anything else from This Is Us people, specifically, ‘Can I have a hug?’ And it’s the most lovely thing. I think that was the gift of the show: We felt connected, especially in a world that feels so divisive and a country that feels incredibly divided right now, that we had a show that allowed people to connect.”

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