He Was Twenty-Five, Newly Sober, and Halfway Out the Door of Every Meeting.
Then a Stranger Grabbed His Arm and Offered Him Lunch.

The Joe Manganiello Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"If it wasn't for John, I don't know that I would have stuck around in AA. There's nothing in my life that I would have if I wasn't sober."

- Joe Manganiello

A Sweet Old Man in Tweed. Then He Showed Joe His Mug Shots.

Joe was twenty-five, broke, newly sober and furious about all of it. "I don't want to go to these stupid meetings and do these stupid steps and get a stupid sponsor." He was arriving as meetings started and leaving the moment they ended. John was seventy-eight - a sweet little old man in a tweed coat and a mustache, in Joe's description completely harmless - and he could see a man with one foot in and one foot out.

One day Joe felt a hand on his arm, looked down, and heard: "I'd like to take you to lunch." It seemed harmless enough, and he was starving. They went to an English tea house across the street in Santa Monica and John ordered everything - the full afternoon tea, the cucumber sandwiches, the entire range of desserts. He was diabetic. "I'm going to watch you eat the desserts and live vicariously."

They talked for hours. Joe had trained at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and had played Streetcar; John collected art, had known Tennessee Williams, had known Elizabeth Taylor. Joe went home and spent the following week looking forward to going back - so that he could take John to lunch. That is the whole mechanism. "It made me look forward to the meetings and look forward to seeing my friend."

Then he went to John's house to pick him up for dinner and found a collection of mug shots on the wall. He asked whose they were. "Those are mine." The man in the tweed coat had been a San Francisco shooting-gallery heroin addict, and had once been arrested for two DUIs on the same day. He kept the photographs up like a hall of fame.

John wanted to meet anyone Joe dated. He made hors d'oeuvres. He watched Joe go from working the back of a construction truck to pay rent, to True Blood and everything after - and when he was sick and bedridden at the end, he sent people out to buy the magazines Joe was in and bring them home to him.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The mug shots and the power of change - ~2:40

He Built an Avatar, Then Lost Respect for Anyone Who Believed It.

He grew up in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, captaining three sports, headed for college ball and then the FBI. A knee injury on a kickoff return gave him the first free afternoons of his life, and what he found in them was that he was an artist. When he quit football, his father's verdict was blunt: "If you don't play football, you won't do anything." He also called the school to try to take Joe off his health insurance. A coach pulled him aside and said that if he had to put Joe on his own policy, Joe was going to play.

What his father did give him he is careful to credit. "My father had a PhD in upstream swimming" - meaning nothing is free, sometimes life doesn't go your way, and you don't have to like it, you just have to do it. Joe's version now is plain: "Talent will be what it is, but you're not going to outwork me." He also went looking for Jim Mooney, a history teacher who had trained bodybuilders in the seventies and was quietly training skinny kids in a garage gym. Mooney gave him the thing his father couldn't: he told him he was proud of him.

Then came True Blood and Magic Mike and a level of fame he describes as validating every part of an addict's personality at once. He made a choice to compartmentalize - to be the forward-facing one, the thing he calls a superhero avatar - and to let the rest of himself go unmentioned. He wanted exemption. "I never wanted to feel pain. I never wanted to feel anger. I never wanted to feel anything negative," and he read fame as the golden ticket out of all of it.

He is clear about the trap he set for himself: "I think I looked down on the people that bought into the avatar, even though I was the one that created it." The frustration peaked on the Magic Mike press tour. He remembers sitting beside director Greg Jacobs in Australia the morning Jerry Weintraub died, all of them reeling, and the first question out of the interviewer's mouth was whether Greg had picked up any moves from the movie.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Mount Lebanon, and the avatar he built - ~10:07

His Wife Had to Authorize Surgeons to Amputate His Large Intestine.

It began with rashes, which he shrugged off. Two months before his wedding to Sofía Vergara, he started bleeding, heavily. The train was moving, so he toughed it out through the ceremony and a honeymoon he spent in pain. Back home, a doctor misdiagnosed him and performed a sphincterectomy on the theory that the problem was pressure. It wasn't, and his body would not heal from the procedure. He spent six weeks lying on his side.

He went to North Carolina to shoot the lead in a series anyway. Within two weeks his skin was breaking out in open hives, he was waking every twenty minutes in a pool of sweat, and he was bleeding so badly he describes toilet bowls full of it. On set he lay down in the dirt and curled into the fetal position because he could not move. They shot around him, came back, and he could hardly speak. They called an ambulance. Two weeks in a North Carolina hospital, production shut down, his role recast, then an airlift to Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles for six more.

Paparazzi camped outside the house and tried to find his room. His wife had to leave in a decoy car, lie down in the back of another, and come in through the loading dock in a wig. His publicist fed the press a story about his appendix - half true, because the appendix did come out. So did the entire large intestine. It had turned to pus and was about to rupture, and he was unconscious when the decision had to be made, so Sofía was given the options and had to choose.

Nobody could tell him what caused it, and nobody can today. His digestive tract, thyroid, eyes, lungs and skin were all malfunctioning at once, and the hospital kept trying to hand him to separate specialists. "No one was looking at it holistically saying, there is something in the control room of your body that is flipping switches." He draws a hard line from it back to his grandmother, who died of what he was fighting - lupus, locking hands, the same cascade of skin conditions.

One night the bleeding stained the bathroom floor red and he cleaned it up himself, crying silently so the woman asleep in the next room wouldn't hear him. What he took from that night is the part people rarely say out loud: that however badly he was suffering, he had to hold a piece of himself in reserve at all times to manage the feelings of the people watching him go through it.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The wedding and the bleeding - ~40:17

He Gave His Gun Away. Then a Sick Chihuahua Picked Him.

Before the dog, he asked for his gun to be taken out of the house. He kept imagining putting it to his head. There was no light at the end of it and no hope in it, so he told his wife to hide it somewhere he couldn't find it, and then to get rid of it.

He didn't want a dog. He hadn't grown up with them. Then at a rescue called Dogs Without Borders a small Chihuahua mix came over to him, let nobody else near him, and would not be put down. She was sleeping on newspaper in a cage, had been taken home and returned by families, was passing blood, and had a cyst they thought might be cancer. The shelter couldn't cover the surgery. He took her anyway, not knowing whether he would be alive the following week.

What that did is the thing sobriety had already taught him and the illness had made him forget. "The best way to get out of your own head is to go be of service." He had to get up in the morning. He had to walk her, clean up after her, feed her. She sat on his lap while he meditated and shadowed him through the rest of the day.

Seven years on, Bubbles has been to more than 150 cities and seventeen countries. She is a certified service animal, not an emotional support animal, and he will correct you on it. He has been needled about it by men in restaurants, and he has an answer ready, but the real one is simpler: "The dog saved my life. And be careful, because you don't know the struggles that people are going through when you see them." He later heard a doctor describe spontaneous remission in autoimmune disease and recognized his own experience - four markers he lists as acceptance, anger, authenticity and agency - though his own account of getting there is less tidy: "I fumbled around in the dark and somehow found the light switch." David's last ask was to finish a sentence, "I knew I was going to be all right when...", and he went straight to a hospital room and a doctor at the foot of the bed shrugging his shoulders. It's gone.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The gun and the dog who saved him - ~1:11:25

"I'm Joe Manganiello, and the person who believed in me was John Edward Robinson III."