‘This Is Us’ alum Justin Hartley on ‘Tracker,’ watches, daughter

There’s just something magical about a guy who knows how to keep cool in an emergency. In CBS’ ratings-dominating show “Tracker,” the weekly stakes involve one of life’s most alarming scenarios: when a loved one goes missing.
Star Justin Hartley became the king of prime time playing a guy who finds those people — often, for a hefty reward fee. But today the handsome star is on a slightly lower-stakes mission: helping this writer find the perfect analog step-counting watch. A tracking watch, if you will.
“I love watches. I collect watches,” the “Tracker” star says via Zoom. “I think I have a hack for you. Give yourself a nice watch. One that doesn’t count your steps. And just get one of those pedometers, like, the size of a quarter. Put it in your pocket.”
Hartley knows a thing or two about steps. He’ll get 30,000 or so in a day — and that’s not counting all the on-screen action. “I’ll look back at the end of a day and it’ll be, like, ‘Wait a minute, I did a whole scene running up a hill where I didn’t have my phone on me!’” he says with a laugh.
If you’ve seen the show, you know Hartley’s character, Colter Shaw, does a lot of running. Running to find missing people, running from other people who don’t want him to find the missing, running to find clues about his father’s mysterious death, and often, running into trouble (sometimes figuratively, but not always).
Hartley, who shot to fame as Kevin Pearson, one of the “Big Three” triplets on “This Is Us,” has taken a turn from emotional drama to action hero — albeit with a side of emotional drama — in the procedural thriller, whose first season saw his character learning gradually more about his own family secrets.
As Hartley’s Colter knows, time is of the essence: His best odds of finding a missing person are in the first 72 hours, according to many criminologists. (Of course, it gets more complicated when that person doesn’t want to be found, like the budding cult member in one of the series’ first episodes.)
So we thought: Who better than Hartley to model timepieces in our new issue? “I’m always switching them up depending on what I’m wearing, or how I’m feeling,” the 47-year-old actor tells Alexa. The morning we speak, he’s clad in the classic combo of a simple white tee and his own Rolex (a Cosmograph Daytona). It looks so right on him that it ends up being included in our cover shoot.
And he’s especially taken with the way some Van Cleef & Arpels watches tell a story. “There’s one where there’s a bridge in the middle of the face, and on the hour side is a woman with a parasol, pointing to the hour, and on the other side is a guy with a cane pointing to the minutes. And then at noon and midnight, they meet and kiss under the bridge. Very, very cool.”
Storytelling is his bread and butter, after all. From his first paid gig on the soap opera “Passions” and two years on the soap “The Young and the Restless,” to his turn in the beloved “This Is Us,” and his current show, he’s always kept viewers riveted to the narrative. In the second season of “Tracker,” which debuted Oct. 13, Colter expands his search for answers about his past while taking on a widening variety of new cases. The season’s trailer even hints at a UFO-tinged plot, which Hartley says they deliberately left “open to interpretation.”
“I don’t judge,” he says. “There are people who think it’s total B.S. that there would ever be aliens out there. And there are people who think that there are. I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything, but I don’t know.” That sort of agnostic position lines up with that of his character, the time-tested American action icon who doesn’t delve too much into his own feelings. “The guy spends a lot of time alone!” Hartley points out with a laugh. Although, he adds, the goal this season was to nudge Colter to open up just a bit.
“We had to build an event where he would be forced to talk about [his past],” Hartley explains. “We introduced another character, a retired police officer, who’s also haunted by a case that went cold. And they forge this friendship based on that, and that’s what sort of forces Colter to talk about it.”
Another important aspect of the new season for Hartley was keeping the story fresh. “People find comfort in the familiarity of the characters, but I also think there’s an appetite for discovery of new things and new characters. You don’t want people going, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve seen an episode of “Tracker,” you see one, you’ve seen them all.’ I don’t like shows like that.”
A second season also gives them a chance to dig further into the backstory of several characters, including a rival tracker named Billie, played by Sofia Pernas, Hartley’s real-life wife and former “Y&R” co-star. But Pernas isn’t playing her husband’s love interest; that’s actress Floriana Lima as Camille, a character who met Colter years earlier on a now-cold case that he can’t seem to shake.
The two performers share a genre past: Lima played Maggie Sawyer on “Supergirl,” while Hartley played the Green Arrow on “Smallville” — as well as voicing Batman on the 2023 podcast “Harley Quinn and the Joker.” Hartley’s sure got the chiseled good looks of a superhero type; at this January’s Golden Globes, the Hollywood Reporter mixed him up with “Twisters” star Glen Powell (leading Powell to quip on X that the two would be starring in “the most boring body-swap movie of all time.”)
He may not be out on the road hunting for reward money with an Airstream in tow, but Hartley, an Illinois native, does love a good road trip — partly thanks to his dog. “My wife and I have a wonderful, beautiful dog. But she’s a doodle. They have anxiety!” he says. “We can’t fly her. So last year, I had a movie, and we drove from LA to Savannah, like 30 something hours, for this dog!” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “We drove up to Vancouver, to Atlanta, we’ve driven pretty much everywhere. We love it.”
The gig that took him to Savannah was “Bride Hard,” a forthcoming comedy starring Rebel Wilson, with a supporting cast that included Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Stephen Dorff. Shot largely outdoors during the middle of the summer in the Deep South, it was a sweaty job — but worth it. “Rebel is great. I’d worked with her before,” Hartley says. “And we all just had a really good time.”
The actor is known for his dramatic roles, but he’s definitely got a well-honed sense of humor. I ask what we might see on a “Tracker” blooper reel. “You know, you might see a couple of misses, a couple of trips,” he says with a laugh. “There was a staircase I was running up in the middle of the night. When you light a dark set, you have these lights that shine directly into the actors’ eyes. I’m running with my gun, up stairs, and I just bit it, bad. It happens. You fall down the mountain the wrong way. Or it’s pouring rain, and now everything’s slippery, and you just wing it.”
His appreciation for life’s more absurd moments comes out on late night appearances, like when he told Jimmy Fallon about his daughter’s habit of purposely embarrassing him in public when she was younger. (Isabella is his daughter from his first marriage, to “Passions” co-star Lindsay Korman; he was subsequently married to actress and “Selling Sunset” star Chrishell Stause before wedding Pernas in 2021.)
Isabella is a junior in college now, he says, and they plan reunions whenever they can despite their packed schedules — though he tries to avoid showing up on campus and making a scene as a recognizable TV star. “That’s her world, so I try to really not do that,” he says. “But she comes to Vancouver and visits. And there’s a lot of FaceTime!”
Hartley’s years on daytime TV taught him some valuable lessons about dedication and acting. “It can be a great training ground,” he says of the soap opera world. “Or it can be a great career.” Then again, he says, “it can also be a huge pitfall. You get really comfortable, and you get a very nice check, and you just kind of say words.”
“You read the script — you’re reading about being at the base of a waterfall. And you show up and you’re like, ‘Oh, we’re actually at the base of a waterfall!’ ” Hartley on filming “Tracker”
Don’t expect Hartley to ever get too comfortable. One of his favorite things about “Tracker” is that it serves up a different assignment almost every day, on location in and around gorgeous Vancouver. “It’s a dream. You read the script — you’re reading about being at the base of a waterfall. And you show up and you’re like, ‘Oh, we’re actually at the base of a waterfall!’ It’s breathtaking. You just never know where you’re going to be.”
And then he’s off, to his next case — at “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” where he will help the host hunt down a missing coffee mug. “It’s good to be busy!” Hartley says with a grin.
To which we can only say: Yeah, that tracks.
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