The Summer of Joe Manganiello Is Just Heating Up

The camera doesn’t add pounds to Joe Manganiello, it subtracts them. The 6’5”, 250-pound actor and longtime professional hunk—from Alcide Herveaux on True Blood to Big Dick Richie in the Magic Mike movies—is almost comically large in person. It doesn’t help that he pretends to break the ancient futon he’s gingerly reclining on (“I’m joking!” he smiles).

We’re in the backyard of a quintessentially bohemian house in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles for our cover shoot. Nestled in his lap and accentuating his heft is Manganiello’s best buddy, an 11-year-old rescue Chihuahua mix named Bubbles. She’s wrapped in a blanket, shaking as the sun sets. He cradles her in his tattooed arms that look like they might rip out of his slim-fit T-shirt, Arnold-in -Twins -style, at any moment.

Bubbles is over this interview before it begins, registering her displeasure with a high-pitched snarl. I do my best to avoid her gaze, lest she lash out.

“She’s a savage,” Manganiello explains, as she scares away the much larger dog, Purple, who actually lives here. “She looks sweet, but she’s very protective.”

Cranky Bubbles and rickety furniture aside, Manganiello is ready to talk. At 47, he has plenty of good news to share. He has a hit show he loves and he’s shattered personal records in the gym, achieving peak fitness in middle age. He also wants to set the record straight on the dissolution of his eight-year marriage, finalized just two months before we meet.

First the good news: This year is the most everywhere Manganiello has been by far. The transition from blockbuster star to reality TV has never been easy, even for the most versatile performer (anyone remember the Rock’s Titan Games ?). But somehow he’s landed exactly where he was destined to be, as host and an executive producer of Deal or No Deal Island , the rare game show spin-off to become its own phenomenon.

As he talks, Manganiello is days away from flying to a mystery island to shoot season two and plotting devious ways to challenge contestants for a chance to win a few mill—or pocket change. It's anxiety-inducing for them and the makings of the best summer ever for him.

The show takes Howie Mandel’s Deal or No Deal and mixes it with equal parts Survivor and MTV’s The Challenge . Deal or No Deal Island delivers contestants to a Caribbean paradise only to force them to trudge through mud, mazes, jungle rope walks, and other obstacles—including fellow cast members’ spite and scheming—for lucrative briefcases. The series’s first season, which wrapped in May, increased its average audience from 2.5 million total viewers via linear (aka old-school) TV to 4.6 million viewers across multiple platforms. On Peacock, it stands as the fastest-growing NBC unscripted debut ever.

The X factor? Manganiello himself. He looks sharp, sure, in his tailored beach-business-casual floral shirts (wardrobe has several of each on hand, given the sweaty weather). But he’s also outed himself as a lifelong game and reality competition show nerd. He lists his childhood favorites for me: Press Your Luck, Password, The $25,000 Pyramid, and Jeopardy! .

But his love of shows with physical stakes started with Survivor . He was hooked from the first season that premiered in 2000. And he and his two roommates threw weekly Survivor parties in their West Hollywood house.

“I was at a house party a few years later and ran into someone who worked for CBS casting, and they said, ‘You would be great for Survivor. ’ I said, ‘Oh my God, I can win!’ I went into my whole strategy, and they said, ‘Would you make a tape? But you can't be an actor.’ ” Since he was working for a masonry company to pay bills, he decided to make an audition tape as Joe the construction worker from Pittsburgh, descendent of an Armenian genocide survivor . “I'm a survivor. I have survivor genes in my blood.”

The producers wanted to cast him, but then a pilot he filmed a year before got picked up. Alas, Manganiello’s Survivor dreams were dashed by, of all things, VH1’s So Notorious starring Tori Spelling. “I had no agent, no manager. I'm shoveling sand and gravel,” he remembers of those early, hungry years.

He’s held onto his Survivor strategy all this time. “I was going to get my eyes corrected by surgery, because I wear contacts, even though I found out they give you contact solution. And I'd met a yogi whose specialty was taking people off solid foods. The philosophy is that you could eat a leaf that contains more nutrients in it than an entire large pepperoni pizza. I was going to wean myself off solid food so I wasn't worried about energy. And then, as a big, athletic male, you're going to help win all the challenges for your tribe. But at the merge, you're going to have to win immunity, because I'm a target.”

So yeah, Manganiello’s been thinking about this whole surviving-in-the-wilderness-on-camera-for-cash thing for quite some time. He’s now relieved to be on the other side, playing the Jeff Probst-type and earning his payday on Deal or No Deal Island . He describes the Joe on the show as both a character and his first earnest expression of himself.

“I don't think people had any idea who I was. When I was on True Blood , people would ask me, ‘Did you grow up on a farm?’ No. When I did Magic Mike, people would say, ‘Oh, did you jump out of cakes?’ No.” It’s easy to imagine fans’ disappointment when he tells them that, instead, he got his start studying Chekhov at a conservatory.

“It's a compliment when people think you are your characters. It means they believe you. What's interesting is now people go, ‘Oh, that's who he is,’ and they can separate me from my characters.”

Contrary to the popular assumption that, surely, the man behind Big Dick Richie must have stripped as a male revue performer (fact: that was Channing Tatum), Manganiello’s thespian roots go back to high school. He was a jock, to be sure: a varsity football player and captain of the basketball and volleyball teams at Pittsburgh’s Mount Lebanon High School, where he graduated in 1995.

But a series of sports injuries and a passion for making amateur movies with friends prompted him to join the theater kids his senior year. He landed the role of the brooding, disturbed Jud Fry in his school’s production of Oklahoma! and, eventually, found his way to the venerated Carnegie Mellon School of Drama.

Again, while his dramatic training might not be the first thing you consider seeing Manganiello’s naked torso in True Blood or Magic Mike , it turned out to be a crucial asset. “Those roles were limit-pushing. There were big actors who said no to both of those. I think it was too daunting.”

Those guys must regret their choices, no? “Some,” Manganiello says. “But, also, if you’re number one on the call sheet, fully committed to the dialect, the nudity, the violence, the high drama, you have to play that stuff honestly. It was deceptively tricky. Someone dies. You have to play that grounded. It has to be real. It has to affect you. And it's happening all the time. And that's why the show was populated with mostly Juilliard and Carnegie Mellon [graduates], Londoners, and Tony winners.”

The actors Manganiello has always looked up to don’t say no to the tough stuff. They “could go on stage, absolutely crush, walk right off, and finish the joke they were telling before they went on. They could just flex in and out, in and out.”

His idols, off the top of his head, share almost nothing in their physicality or personality. Coming up in the industry in the 90s, it was Gary Oldman, Val Kilmer, and Edward Norton. By the 2000s, it was Christian Bale. (“They should just give him the Oscar every time he goes to work.”) And, curveball, Viggo Mortensen, particularly in weird, viscerally uncomfortable David Cronenberg movies ( A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method, Crimes of the Future ). “He signs up for scary roles. Gnarly, but I love that. That’s what excites me about being an artist.”

When I offer that the only thing that unites his idols is a virtuosic range in the kinds of characters they can pull off, he nods. “I know I’m the size that I am, but it seems versatile to me, going from Southern high drama to Pee-wee Herman’s best friend.”

The evolution of Manganiello hasn't slowed one bit. And last year, at 46, he broke all his weightlifting personal records. He gives credit where it’s due: namely, his trainer, Ron Mathews , and a nutritionist he’s seen for 12 years who used to work for NASA. “He’ll take 10 vials of your blood, then three weeks later, you get 26 pages of results. He tells you exactly what you should be eating—what I’m designed to eat.” It’s not shocking to learn Manganiello is designed to eat meat.

This kind of Hollywood treatment is afforded with Hollywood paychecks, but Manganiello wasn’t suddenly gifted with a Marvel-sized lifestyle budget. His approach from the start has been to invest the money he earns in himself.

“My first year on True Blood, I lived off my savings. I was paid next to nothing for that first season, and I put all that money into my trainer and a publicist. I didn’t have the money to be spending on Hugh Jackman’s trainer, right? But I just fucking made it happen.”

That gamble paid off handsomely, as he was recognized for his acting chops—not just his physique. When I mention I hope he successfully negotiated a much better contract in season two, he just smiles—the non-verbal confirmation of a seasoned pro.

Of course, not all bets have paid out. We know the very real struggle he’s had in the past year. We know each other knows it, without exchanging words, because everyone knows it.

Last year, his personal life became uncomfortably, often painfully, scrutinized by the public. He didn’t necessarily sign up for that part of the job, but there was no avoiding it. He started a relationship with Sofía Vergara after they met at the 2014 White House Correspondents' Association dinner. They married in 2015, and looked to be in it for the long haul, at least as far as Hollywood romances go—until announcing their split in July 2023.

Vergara spoke to different media outlets at the start of this year, as their divorce was still in legal limbo. A narrative materialized. “I’m newly divorced from my second husband, who I was with for 10 years,” she told Spanish newspaper El País in January 2024. “My marriage broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids and I didn’t want to be an old mom.”

“There's been a lot said in the press about me wanting a family,” Manganiello says, answering my open question about what he wishes he could’ve told pre-fame Joe about the “funny process” of Hollywood, in his words.

Understanding the gravity of the subject, Manganiello pauses to choose his words. “That’s simply not true,” he says of the El País story.

“We did try to have a family for the first year and a half. And we had a huge conversation right out of the gate during the first month we dated. I said, ‘If you're done with kids, then I understand. Just tell me, and I'll know what this is, and that's okay.’ But that wasn't the case with her. And I swore to her that I would never leave if it didn't work out. And I didn't.”

What really frustrates him is the framing of how the relationship imploded. Character is important to him, he says. Yes, he did want to have kids, but that “wasn't inevitably why everything ended. It's because two people grew apart, and sometimes that happens.” But the way that fact was distorted, he says, and affected how people thought of him hurts.

“To be painted as if I had some sort of midlife crisis, and after nine years, turned to somebody and gave them an ultimatum of, ‘Do this potentially unhealthy thing to your body, or else I'm gone’? That’s never who I was.”

In the crawl to 50, Manganiello is having a midlife discovery. He’s eating the “third bite of the apple,” as he thinks of it. “This is like a third phase to my career and life.”

He embraced his love of unscripted television to find a hit that perfectly suits him. And blasting through his personal strength records enlightened him about what’s still possible. “I didn’t expect to do that. It was like, Holy shit, we’re doing this. I was the biggest I’d ever been,” he says. “I hear people all the time complain to me ‘Well, I’m 37, it’s over.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m 47. I can do anything better than ever.’ ”

He has a new relationship with girlfriend Caitlin O'Connor, and felt comfortable enough to hard-launch it on Instagram in February. “When you have a bad day, hopefully you have a good partner in life,” he tells me.

He’s writing another book. His first, 2013’s Evolution , is a guidebook to sculpting your body and mental well-being. From the sound of it, this next tome will be more of a memoir. And he has an upcoming role he’s very hyped for, but can’t talk about quite yet.

Manganiello is flexing behind the scenes, too. He’s set to produce and star in a zombie apocalypse thriller based on the book Mountain Man . And he became an executive producer for the second season of Deal or No Deal Island , which he expects to come out early next year, in line with the first batch of episodes. The position gives him free reign to make contestants’ lives even more hellish by pitching challenge ideas.

“First of all, I want someone to win as much money as humanly possible. Number two, I want chaos. I want to test how bad they want it. I want people to be in uncomfortable situations.” Other twists: “There might be a new banker. We might be on a different banker’s island.” And, with all love to Howie Mandel, this banker might carry even more heat. “I might have put in a call to a friend.” The mind reels at the possibilities—Channing Tatum? Steven Soderbergh? Salma effing Hayek?!

Again: Dude is everywhere , nonstop. His life is good. He’s savoring this summer. He knows it, we know it. Despite her grumbles, Bubbles, whom Manganiello never fails to bring on any flight to whatever gig, knows it, too.

“I have so much fun,” he says so sincerely that I swear his flawless, beaming smile goes one shade whiter. “I love the randomness.”

The randomness—the Island , the book, the zombie thriller, this backyard photoshoot—loves him back. And so at the end of another day in another random location, stretched over a dilapidated couch, the larger-than-life Manganiello happily stands, stretches, and prepares to walk Bubbles the few blocks back to his home. No more cameras or journalists or handlers. Just his tiny protector by his side.