Joe Manganiello’s interests are far and wide — and a glimpse at his resume is testimony to that.
The 48-year-old’s star began rising in 2009 after he landed his breakout role as werewolf Alcide Herveaux in the supernatural series “True Blood.” He then entered the “Magic Mike” universe as Big Dick Richie when the first film was released in 2012, and he most recently starred alongside Vince Vaughn in the 2025 Netflix comedy “Nonnas.”
But Manganiello isn’t just defined by his acting career: In 2023, he appeared on “Finding Your Roots” and has been vocal ever since about how ancestry revelations have changed his life. He’s also a proud pet parent to his senior dog, Bubbles, who is frequently by his side (and, of course, has her own Instagram account).
Now, Manganiello appears to be in his hosting era. In addition to hosting NBC’s “Deal or No Deal Island,” he’s now airing out his passion for theme parks as host of the network’s one-hour special called “Inside the Worlds of Epic Universe.”
The program, which premieres on NBC Aug. 20 at 9 p.m. ET and streams on Peacock the next day, explores the five worlds that make up Universal Epic Universe at Universal Orlando Resort: Celestial Park, Super Nintendo World, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter—Ministry of Magic, How to Train Your Dragon—Isle of Berk and Dark Universe.
Ahead of the theme park’s May 22 opening date, Manganiello sat down with TODAY.com while filming at Epic Universe to talk about his multifaceted identity and career, and how his worlds have collided.
Universal and Peacock are part of our parent company, NBCUniversal. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
So, you’re here filming the Epic Universe TV special. Tell me about your involvement in it.
Well, I’m assuming because I’m an NBCUniversal employee that I got asked to host and launch the special for the park, which is super cool, so I get to see it first. And then, you know, hanging out with some of the actors, some of the projects, Warwick Davis from “Harry Potter,” the two stars of “How to Train Your Dragon” came by.
Toothless?
The actors. Well, no, then we get to go see Toothless, which is nuts. That animatronic dragon, it’s crazy. And you scratch his chin and he starts, like, kind of purring and growling.
We’re not used to being able to engage in technology like that on our own.
It was like those robots in, like, the Hall of Presidents (at Disney World). And now it’s like, yeah, it’s pretty amazing. And even in the Dark Universe ride (Monsters Unchained), all those animatronic creatures were incredible. Frankenstein, it’s nuts.
So yeah, it’s been super fun to get to do all of that. You revert (back to) childhood when you do it, you do start thinking what you would think as a kid. And yeah, kind of having your mind blown and seeing all this stuff for real, and being able to walk around inside of it. It’s pretty incredible.
What childhood memories have been coming back to you?
I was on “True Blood” for so many years as a werewolf. And I do think the kid that I was manifested that for me as an adult, because Halloween was always the big holiday for me, and my mom would make me costumes and things. So, you know, I dressed up like Dracula as a kid and in your mind, when you’re a little kid, you’re pretending that you’re a vampire. And I remember my parents taking me to a haunted house when I was little, and I guess there was a Dracula that popped out of a coffin, and I was dressed as Dracula, so I walked up to the coffin and put my hands up, and he picked me up and put me in the coffin and closed it with me in it.
What?! Were you freaked out?
No, I’m a vampire, this is a vampire! So you’re like, “This is what I’m supposed to do,” yeah, like, I was in character as a little kid, I knew, like, “Why am I afraid? I’m going to go live with the vampires.”
That’s very brave for a kid.
You’re being very diplomatic. But that’s the thing: I think as a kid, you know … I think it was a Val Kilmer quote where he said, “Kids dream of being Batman, not the guy in the Batman suit, not the actor in the Batman suit.” And so there’s a bit of, you know, I never dreamed of being an actor playing a werewolf. I dreamed of being a werewolf. So here, you get to walk around and pretend that maybe you are in that medieval village, this Gothic, Romanian village.
You brought your dog, Bubbles, through Dark Universe last night. Do you dress your dog up for Halloween?
This past year, I dressed her up for Cinco de Mayo. OK, she’s a Chihuahua, so we celebrate Cinco de Mayo. … The year before, we were actually in Firenze, Italy, for Halloween, and we had a little dragon costume that we put on her with little flappy wings. … People send me all kinds of things. I think there’s, like, an avocado costume in the closet. She was a bat one year — cool, flappy wings.
Another thing that I know that is important to you is your ancestry. You were on “Finding Your Roots” in 2023.
I actually got the results the year before that. It took them a year because I made some discoveries during that year that then pushed the episode to the following season.
I want to be clear also that, because of my mother’s side of the family, I’ve been interested in genealogy from a young age because of the Armenian German component that I knew about. I grew up knowing I was Armenian, I knew that I was German, but didn’t know how or from who, and that’s what led me to apply (to “Finding Your Roots”) and it took 10 years. And finally, they got to the point where they thought, “Yeah, it was going to work.” The technology just wasn’t there, and they thought they were going to run into roadblocks because the Armenian genocide. … And then finally, after 10 years, their team thought, “OK, I think science is at the place where we have access to enough databases that we think we could do something. So let’s try.” And so they actually came back after about six months and said, “We don’t think we’re going to be able to do it,” but then a month later, they made a breakthrough and then they said it’s on.
Wow.
And then they called me back about a month after that, and gave me the option of ducking out of the episode, of opting out of the episode because of the paternity issue involving my father’s side. They can’t reveal paternity issues unless there’s consent and knowledge by all parties involved, and because my father’s still alive and he needed to be informed if we were going to move forward to reveal potentially who his father was. So then that blew open, that was the big discovery that then blew open my father’s side of the family tree.
It’s been three years since I got those results, and I’ve had multiple historians on payroll running down loose ends. I found my German family members, there was part of the German family living in Canada, and I got in contact with them and they had a handwritten German family tree that went back to the 1400s. I got hooked up with a historian in Germany, went and ran all of it down, and I found my ancestors that fought in the Napoleonic wars. There’s a famous architect, a mayor in the town where they all came from. Then I have another historian that specializes in New England and Virginia, and he’s been working for the past two years, unraveling all of that, and dipped into my Irish ancestry. My great-great-grandfather came over during the potato famine, joined the Union Army and fought in the American Civil War and disappeared somewhere out West shortly thereafter. I’m actually going to go from here to New England for my cousin’s wedding, and I’m going to go to the memorial and grave marker of my fifth great-grandfather (Plato Turner), an African slave who fought in the American Revolution against the British.
And then, about a year and a half ago, I got a ping on 23andMe that my father has a half sister living in Ohio. That same biological grandfather had another child eight years later, so I got to meet her and I have a half aunt living in Ohio.
It keeps going.
So the talk with “Finding Your Roots” is about doing their first-ever sequel episode, because also finding her then proved without a shadow of a doubt who my biological grandfather was. I left “Finding Your Roots” not knowing definitely who my biological grandfather was, but her DNA proved it, so we know it was this man. Then I did some digging and found a marriage certificate from the 1800s that proves where my European Y chromosome cut … which also proves what I think my last name is because there were multiple, but I need to go on the show (again) to test some people genetically. We’re putting together a kind of rogues’ gallery of people’s genes we want to test to see if I match their Y chromosome, and then there’s a village on the border of Wales and England where I think my last name comes from … anyway.
I struck a chord. Thank you for sharing all that.
Don’t get me started, I know.